doodie.com features a new, four-to-12 second animation every day — each one is based on waste. The characters in his cartoons are literally full of it: they shape it, play with it, toss it, roll in it and relish it. It becomes a revered substance — albeit a hilarious one.

Constant idea generation isn’t easy for Winkler, but stints on “The Simpsons” and John Lovitz’s “The Critic” have ensured that he’s well-versed in animated humor. Easy-to-download GIFs make the site accessible even to the slowest modem, and Winkler’s artistic flair keeps the fans coming back — to the tune of 6,000,000 hits each month.

“All the masters say ‘follow your bliss,’” says Winkler in his matter-of-fact manner. “Well, doodie humor cracks me up. I think it’s just incredibly funny.” As, apparently, do many others. Winkler has turned doodie into a full-time business. He sells advertising banners on the site and t-shirts and club memberships on the side. This brings in enough to hire two part-time employees, though Winkler plans eventually to employ a full staff of animators. This would bring doodie.com’s creator full-circle: paying striving young artists to make sure that doodie’s doodie look exactly like it does right now — just the sort of thing that drove him from “The Simpsons.”

Winkler, who moved to Los Angeles from Connecticut in the early ’80s for just such an opportunity as “The Simpsons” provided, is hardly contrite about his decision. “Don’t get me wrong. It was an honor to work on that show,” he says of the season he spent there. “But as an artist, I wasn’t fulfilled. They were only interested in making sure Bart Simpson looked like Bart Simpson, and I just don’t think I’m very good at being a spoke in a wheel. It’s a great show, but I’m more of an entrepreneur, more of a creator, more of an artist. That makes me sound like some sort of pretentious jerk, but I really believe it.”

Reluctant to work for anyone but himself, Winkler’s prospects did not look promising — until he became intimate with the Internet. In a turn of events he still finds amazing, Winkler discovered in the Web a means to identify exactly what he wanted to do. Then he followed his dream to fruition. As an animator in the pre-Internet 1980s, one could either make shorts for fringe film festivals, or pitch ideas to animation studios around town. “But if you pitch something to a studio, you walk in with Wally the Whale, and leave with Andy the Ant,” he says. “I’m just grateful that I live in this time.”

Winkler believes that Picasso and Van Gogh would have felt the same way. “If those guys had access to Web technology, I think this is what they’d be doing.”

Winkler’s Web site is working wonders for his career. In addition to the money it brings in from banner ads and membership fees, doodie.com acts as an online portfolio for his work.

Winkler recently finished work on Adam Sandler’s short film “The Peeper.” Jim Moloshok, president of Warner Online (Sandler’s record label), was already a fan of doodie.com and made the necessary introductions.

Bruce Helford, co-creator and executive producer of “The Drew Carey Show,” is one, too. When looking for an opening sequence for Norm MacDonald’s ABC sitcom, “Norm,” Helford immediately considered doodie.

“I wouldn’t have even thought of animating the main title sequence if I hadn’t already been a fan of Tom’s work,” says Helford. “I’m not necessarily a big fan of animated main titles. I’ve seen a lot of them come off very precious, and didn’t want anything like that. But his style is so great and edgy, which is the way our show is, that I thought it would be perfect.” The show airs Wednesdays on ABC.

“We’re all fans,” says Deborah Oppenheimer, an executive producer on the show. “It reminds me of early New Yorker material. We’re looking to do something different in network television, so the idea of bringing in an Internet sensibility was really appealing to us. That’s why we went after him.”

In addition to a new daily animation, doodie.com offers an archive of cartoons dating back to its inception in March. Along the way, Winkler has acquired legions of fans, many because of his strict standards of — brace yourself — decorum. “I don’t make doodie.com for kids,” he says, “but knowing that kids will log on, I have a line I won’t cross. I don’t draw full frontal nudity, I don’t draw sex acts. And that keeps it in a realm that’s simply fun and playful.”

Helstrom agrees. He peruses the site with his young sons, and is unsure who is more amused, himself or them. “There’s no violence in the site, and the kids love the humor” he says. “To a kid, the funniest thing in the world is to put the word ‘poop’ on anything. It is such a part of their lives.”

“People make it happen,” Winkler says. “They see something of quality on the Web, and e-mail their friends about it, and before you know it you’ve got an audience. And there you’ve done it. You’ve circumvented the whole system. No gallery people telling you you can’t have a show there. No TV people watering it down because it’s too long, too short, too big, too small, too sexy, too disgusting. I’m doing exactly what I want to do, and I’m having a great time in the process.”

Before party leaders Sunday night announced a debt ceiling deal that is “all spending cuts,” as House Speaker John Boehner described it, Krugman offered a grim analysis. He predicted that unemployment would rise again to nine percent again and that America will experience economic consequences comparable to Japan’s “lost decade,” (when an economic program of frugality hindered recovery from an asset bubble collapse in the 1990s).

Krugman criticized the debt negotiations:

Basically the Republicans said we’ll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want, and the President said OK. That’s what happened. . . . We’re having a debate in Washington which is all about, “we’re going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republican’s terms or 10o percent of the Republican’s terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.

Watch Krugman’s appearance below, including a brief spat with conservative columnist, George Will:

“I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money,” Diallo told Newsweek. She repeated a similar sentiment to Roberts.

ABC’s Roberts called Diallo’s media blitz “an unusual and risky move.” But Diallo and her team are trying to regain control over the narrative after several weeks of stories in which her background and credibility have been questioned. “Because of him they call me a prostitute,” Diallo told ABC.

Prosecutors are currently undecided on whether to proceed with the charges against Strauss-Kahn, after raising doubts about Diallo’s credibility, largely based on issues unrelated to the alleged incident in Strauss-Kahn’s New York hotel suite. These include lies found on Diallo’s asylum application and findings that she had ties to petty criminals.

Diallo’s account of events, as she told them to both Newsweek and ABC News, cohere with hospital records detailing minor injuries on her body — including the fact that “doctors observed five hours afterward that there was ‘redness’ in the area of the vagina where she alleges Strauss-Kahn grabbed her.”

However, as Newsweek notes, “If there is one inconsistency for defense lawyers to dwell on in the hospital records, it is a passage that says her attacker got dressed and left the room, and ‘said nothing to her during the incident.’ In her interview with police and her account to Newsweek, Diallo recalled several statements Strauss-Kahn made during the alleged attack.”

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers have described Diallo’s interviews as “an unseemly circus,” but Diallo says she felt she had “no choice” but to go public after staying silent for almost two months.

Watch the video below of Diallo speaking with ABC News’ Robin Roberts:

We take a look at some of the more egregious examples of stations trying to make this non-story work below.

In 2009, Katie Couric did a short segment on Friggatriskaidekaphobia, a phobia of Friday the 13th, which raises the question: Why do we need a name for something everyone has?

Then this year, Jeff Glor repeated Katie’s segment almost verbatim.

Also in 2009 was the amazing CBS exposé on the Friday the 13th Insane Clown Posse show. One of the most unintentionally funny segments in news history.

Other network news anchors took a different tack, asking if this could mean a bad day for the markets. But first: walking under a ladder!

 ABC  affiliates take a nontraditional route and go out to find some fun stuff to do on this bad luck holiday, because why not?

I’m starting to think the worst part of today is making it through corny TV spots.

Next stop on the Campbells’ tour of horrors would be”Good Morning America,” where Kerry today went on with Britney to discuss the controversy as well as defend her decision to put needles full of poison into her daughter’s face to “get rid of the lines.”

Man, calm down, everyone! What’s the big deal? This all seems totally safe and legitimate: The mom does it to herself (she’s a part-time aesthetician so it’s kosher) and she gets the Botox to inject into her child’s head through an unnamed source who is “behind the doctor scene.” It’s all on the up-and-up. If anything, Kerry Campbell’s only crime is being too good of a mother.