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E.D. Hill, who has always seeemed to us like the meanest PTA mommy ever to make her way onto cable TV, took the progressive route in discussing the Duke rape case: Let’s just skip the messy details and call the accuser a whore. Now, the “Fox & Friends” crew are clearly just a bunch of trained collies (No offense, collies!), but their discussion of the alleged rape victim — whom they all insist on referring to as “the stripper” — was pretty remarkable. Hill starts by marveling how much the woman makes as a stripper, then wonders why a student would need to make that much money when her tuition is only $1,800 a semester. Sure, she has two children, but Hill points out that she’s divorced, and so “you assume that she’s getting some child support” — a really moronic assumption. The absurdity of a wealthy TV talking head questioning why a working class mother would dare make a living wage is obviously lost on these numbskulls. Instead, Hill imagines that The Stripper could make as much as $800 a day, which prompts co-anchor Brian Kilmeade to wag his tail, get out his super-duper fast mental calculator and report that, at that rate, “you could pay for your tuition in less than a month!”

Open Salon interview.

A struggling Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., went nuclear Wednesday, with an ad that tries to ally challenger Bob Casey with North Korea and China. Ah, the acrid smell of desperation in the weeks before a congressional election! Be prepared for even more of these terror-filled spots in these glorious final days of Campaign 2006, all of which carry a little DNA from the mother of all scare ads: The 1964 Lyndon Johnson “Daisy Girl” ad against Barry Goldwater (bottom ad, below).

From Michael Scherer’s piece today: “The GOP seems to believe that Ford’s appeal to its most reliable voters is working. In recent days, the Republican National Committee has attempted to reverse the troubling polls in Tennessee with a television ad that both attacks Ford’s religious credentials and invokes that old standby of American politics, racial fear.”

This National Republican Senatorial Committee ad against Harold Ford sports an early mention of a Playboy connection that the party hopes will rile Christians against Ford.

Salon’s piece on Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s senate campaign spotlights his appeal to churchgoers, as in the TV spot below.