Subjecting this Associated Press photo of President George W. Bush at the first debate to extremely feverish analysis, top conspiracy experts at Salon.com have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the president carried a great big yellow kind of thingy during the first debate, back on Sept. 30. (Click the photos at right for the larger A.P. photograph.)

Partisan political operatives denied that this new revelation was some kind of partisan political operation, possibly a payback for the scandals caused by “cheat sheets” being used by Senators Kerry and Edwards in previous debates.

Bush apparently attempted to conceal the whatsis from the audience by holding it behind his podium, but the dealy is clearly revealed by the A.P. photo, which was shot from the president’s left-hand side.

“This photo proves!! Bush cheated!!!!!” said one Salon source, an expert on concealed thingamabobs and exclamation point usage. “It’s a big yellow cheating-doohickey of some sort! See how he holds the black hose-looking part just above the top of the podium, where it would be invisible to the audience? That’s the cheating hose, that’s what that is!!”

Since Salon broke the story of this scandal, it has been picked up by respected news sources, with reportage on blog.gleeson.us, Wizbang, and Say Anything.

From CNN: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again,” Edwards said.

Now, bear in mind, Edwards made this promise after Reeve’s death. So, “people like Christopher Reeve” are… what, exactly? Right.

(Nods to Kerry Spot, Power Line, Wizbang, and Polipundit. And apologies to Rembrandt.)

UPDATE: Hey!

You’re not wearing that tonight, are you George?

(Oh, wait. Different George.)

In the future, we will be summarizing our site traffic and other boring data at the end of every month. But this one time, we’re jumping the gun and publishing the figures based on only the last six days, because we’re trying to line up some nice patrons, and we need to tell them something. (By the way, if you would like to talk about advertising on this blog, please e-mail sean@gleeson.us.)

DAILY TRAFFIC
Before Sept. 29, 2004, this blog didn’t exist. (We have posts dated earlier than that, but those were ported over from Xanga and other sites.)

For the first six days in October, when our domain name wasn’t resolving properly, we averaged 517 pageviews, and 218 visits, per day. (If you couldn’t get to blog.gleeson.us for those six days, here’s what you missed.) On Oct. 6, our server problem was fixed, so the stats from Oct. 7 onward are the true accounting of the site’s traffic.

For the second six days in October (Oct. 7 through 12), we averaged 3,905 pageviews, and 1,380 unique visits, per day. Here are the day-by-day numbers:

Not a bad start, all taken with all. Lessons learned? Maybe “Columbus, the first terrorist!” wasn’t the hilarious headline I thought it was. I guess I should’ve titled that post “Nudegate: 1492.”

GOOGLETRACKING
It’s kind of fun to see where we rank in searches for various terms. As of this writing, blog.gleeson.us shows up somewhere on page one (the first ten results) for the following Google searches: