Michelle Kosinski yesterday accused Bush of staging his video conference with the troops in Iraq.

She, in turn, found herself, er, up a creek. (Via OTB)

In an apparent effort to draw attention to herself, in yesterday’s segment she turned up in hip waders, standing thigh-deep in the flood waters.

Taking her act one step further, this morning she appeared on a suburban street . . . paddling a canoe. There was one small problem. Just as the segment came on the air, two men waded in front of Kosinki . . . and the water barely covered their shoe tops! That’s right, Kosinski’s canoe was in no more than four to six inches of water!

An embarrassed Kosinski claimed the water was deeper down the street but that her producers didn’t want to let her go there for fear she’d drift away. But Katie and Matt, perhaps peeved by her attempted scene-stealing, couldn’t resist ribbing her.

Matt: “Are these holy men, perhaps walking on top of the water?”

“Gee, is your oar hitting ground, Michelle?” inquired Katie, as she and Matt dissolved into laughter.

Moral of the story: people in canoes in a few inches of water shouldn’t throw video-stunt stones.

Man, that’s funny. (As usual, Ian has the video, though it looks like Drudge might have killed his server. Quite a way to congratulate him on his one year blogoversary, which I think was yesterday.)

UPDATE: Incidentally, Sgt Ron Long was at the press conference that was allegedly “staged.” Read what he has to say. (Via MM)

And Kevin really likes this quote: “It’s not like we were trying to pass it off as something it wasn’t”

You have to admit, this is pretty creative.

Like many shoppers, attorney Stephen Diamond buys lots of stuff online. But unlike other consumers, he sues retailers that don’t charge him state and local sales taxes — and is making a profit doing it.

Using a state whistle-blower law, Mr. Diamond since 2002 has filed about 95 suits in Cook County court here against retailers that failed to charge him taxes on Internet sales, alleging that they broke the law. In cases where the state of Illinois joins the suits and prevails, he is entitled to up to 25% of the financial damages, with the rest going to state coffers.

Captain Ed distills the WaPo’s “Polling Free-Fall Among Blacks” article.

In other words, it’s ludicrous and simply folly to use it for a report. Bear in mind, however, that Froomkin wasn’t alone in spouting it to the world. Tim Russert repeated it on Wednesday night’s NBC network news show with Brian Williams.

But it gets better — or worse, depending on your point of view — if the reader holds out to the fourteenth paragraph. The Post updates the story thus:

[Late Update: The Pew Research Center is just out with its latest poll, which has a larger sample, and it finds Bush’s approval rating among blacks at 12 percent, down only slightly from 14 in July. Here are those results.]

So the biggest free-fall in history has George Bush losing 2 points among a demographic which proportionally voted for him in reality one point lower last November than where he shows now. All of the numbers in the Pew poll fall within the margin of error — which means Bush hasn’t fallen at all among African-Americans.

And Conan O’Brien used it last night too. Captain says: “Welcome to the birth of an urban legend.”