Just gaze over there to your left and drink it in for a moment. Priceless, isn't it? In so many ways.

Big-time dollmaker KB Toys launches our very own shrub as a non-herbal action figure in September, calling him "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator." It's supposed to depict Fearless landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, but isn't something missing?

All the details here in this Washington Post story--except the important one. But tread lightly. "Hard-news" reporters often humiliate themselves when they try to write cute, and this piece by Dana Milbank is a world-class dorkfest. Check out his lead:

Holy photo op, Batman! The president of the United States has become a military action figure.

No, I didn't make that up. He actually wrote it, and no one at the paper had the heart or the sense to change it for him. He also includes inane crap about a former pentagon officer who doesn't like Bush, but leaves out the elephant dong missing from the living room. Apparently Dana and/or his editors don't have half the balls the White House tried to shove in our faces this spring.

Dana seems clueless about how to fill out this story. What a waste of precious God-given material. Watch for the Daily Show treatment tonight. Ten to one they zoom right in on the deflated jockstrap.

If you spent the spring under a rock and never saw it, check out the original model here. In fact, let's run both plastic versions again, side by side. You can just never get too much of a good pictures:

Hey, look how Big George is looking at Little George. Not half the man he used to be.

Richard Goldstein was one of the few journalists not to shy away from the obvious this spring. Check out Bush's Basket, from the May 21 Village Voice.

There's a great big piece this morning in the Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how Dean is organizing a little army of volunteers in NH.

The campaign is using a somewhat radically decentralized approach, which is riskier but empowering: unleashing the volunteers to make a lot of decisions on their own.

It's nice to see the campaign from a different perspective than you get from the New York Times or Washington Post. And the writing in this piece is surprisingly vivid for a small town pub. (The writer is Lisa Wangsness.) Here's her opening:

Howard Dean's campaign strategists huddled in Manchester for five hours last Sunday to write their battle plan for winning the New Hampshire primary ground war.

The brain trust included several dozen paid staff and - never mind that it took up a whole summer Sunday afternoon - 426 volunteers from across the state.

Capitalizing on a summer surge that has catapulted their candidate from the back of the Democratic primary pack to the covers of Time and Newsweek, the campaign hopes to multiply its New Hampshire base at least 30-fold over the next 77 days. And the delegates at Sunday's Dean Organizing Convention were charged with planning and executing a strategy for their neck of the woods.

Here's the difference:

Campaigns have always relied on vast battalions of local volunteers and college kids to knock on doors and lick envelopes. But the Dean camp hopes to build a new community of organizers in New Hampshire who will use a combination of [old and new, such as] plans to do community service in the candidate's name.

The Dean people want their volunteers to motivate themselves - not to wait for a campaign aide to call them and ask for an hour of their time. ... "We're not treating voters like they're customers - instead, we're treating them as participants," Hicks said in an interview yesterday.

... instead of a single online campaign contribution form, the campaign asks supporters to build their own Dean Web sites to solicit online donations from people they know. Nearly 70,000 Dean supporters from around the country use the Internet to plan local, in-person meetings through the Web site Meetup.com - and at those meetings, they've been writing personal, handwritten letters to uncommitted voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Through Deanmediateam.com, one of the dozens of unofficial Dean Web sites, the campaign asks graphic designers, photographers and sound technicians to lend their expertise to the cause.

Much more in the piece.

This is today's Dean Story of the Day. Other recent entries here.

Comprehensive index to Dean stories at the Dean News Clearinghouse.

I've been compiling the media coverage of the Dean campaign each day into something called the Dean News Clearinghouse, where you can see nearly all the latest news on Howard, or search through the archives of coverage since June 30.

But there have been about three dozen entries a day lately, and though I try to put the major stories on top, it's hard to highlight the real gems. So I'm starting a new feature called "Dean Story of the Day," where I will highlight one really good story his campaign each day.

I will try to mix in some major national stories from some local coverage from Iowa or New Hampshire that you're probably not aware of, as well as some great indie (or quasi-indie) sources like Salon, Slate and Alternet.

I may decide to do two some days if it's really warranted, or skip days where nothing special appears. You can check out the latest each day, or look through the recent entries. Either way, you can always click here, to bring you to the latest entries, most recent on top. (Soon I will also add a direct link in the left column, under Dean's pic, and also an entry in the "Finding Posts . . . By Category" section of the left column.)

Update: I have posted today's entry, and included a few great recent ones.

I had no idea Howard had a book coming. Am I the last to know?

Publisher's Weekly just posted an article titled "Schwarzenegger, The New Howard Dean," which mentions Dr. Dean's book near the end:

Lest it seem S&S isn't taking full advantage of the marketing possibilities presented by the Running Man's run for office, Rothberg called PW back to remind us that S&S has a book coming out in November by another hot candidate, presidential hopeful Dr. Howard Dean, titled Winning Back America. "He certainly is the man of the moment," says Rothberg, touting Dean's appearance on the cover of two big news weeklies' Aug. 11 issues. "There are not too many people who get the cover of both Time and Newsweek."

I felt better once I visited Amazon and discovered they still didn't know the title. They still list it as "Untitled Memoir." Perhaps one of you should fill them in. You can pre-order it now for the low, low price of $10.40 (it's a trade paperback, 240 pages).

Right now its Amazon rank is 51,381. It will be fun to watch that number move. I bet the Deaniacs have been tracking it for weeks, though their whispers had somehow gotten past me.

It's not, you know. Some words are special. That one might be my favorite. Even though it hurts me.

I hear that title out loud in my head at least three times a week. Every time somebody utters the word passion, it echoes off the back wall of my brain in response: passion is no ordinary word. Sometimes it ricochets out my mouth and people look at me funny, continue their sentence as if nobody interrupted.

Sometimes you have to. Passion is no ordinary word. Best song title ever. Favorite album ever (Squeezing Out Sparks--ferociously good title, too. I've only felt that emotion a few hundred thousand times. Every time I'm driven to this keyboard; not the times I come here because I'm supposed to.)

Not favorite song, not even on this album, but easily favorite idea. A few titles change your life forever. The World According to Garp. Doesn't matter how good the book was, that title changed me long before I flipped through the pages. I saw the world very differently after that one. I gave up your little world 30 seconds later. Been the world according to dave ever since. Conclusive Evidence, obviously. Passion is no ordinary word--how can you see the world quite the same after that idea?

It just came up in a comment. Harder when nobody's hear in person. I could type it out into the screen, and I did of course, but that doesn't seem to quench it. Passion passion passion. Passion is no ordinary word. Ain't manufactured. Or just another sound--that you hear at night.

Builds up to exploding, sometimes. Got to get it out, got to get it out. Got to unleash it somehow. Lyrics won't do it justice without Grahman Parker's wail or Brinsley Schwartz's guitar slicing open your flesh. But I'll throw a few lines out here because I have to. Here comes the climax:

Say how it feels, real useless ain't it
Wait until it bites right down inside you
The world is easy when you're just playing around with it
Everything's a thrill, and every girl's a kill
And then it gets unreal
And then you don't feel anything
You don't feel anything
You don't feel anything

Passion is no ordinary word
Passion is no ordinary word (I think I love you)
Passion is no ordinary word (I think I love you)
Ain’t manufactured
Or just another sound
That you hear at night at night

--------

(You can hear 30 seconds of it here, but they're not the best 30.)

Ann Richards was just gushing her little heart out on Larry King tonight--once he brought up Howard Dean: "I think Howard Dean is a phenomenon. I have never seen in my lifetime, a grassroots organization like Howard Dean has put together. It is phenomenal.

" . . . I think there is something going on here, that is unlike anything we have seen before."

On Lieb saying Dean is a road to nowhere: "Well I think Lieberman has got to say something, because he obviously isn't going anywhere."

Heeheehee. Love the way that lady speaks her mind.