The New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a gun-toting militant will probably play into all of the misconceptions he has had to fight during his presidential campaign, Obama told CNN’s Larry King last night.

But according to CNN, he downplayed the cartoon.

“It’s a cartoon … and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment,” Obama said. “And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

“I’ve seen and heard worse,” he said. “I do think that in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But that was their editorial judgment.”

Watch “Obama”:http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/15/lkl.obama/index.html#cnnSTCVideo on Larry King.

JibJab and its animated satire is back with a prod at Obama, McCain, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the 2008 elections.

You can watch “Time for Some Campaignin”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adc3MSS5Ydc on YouTube.

Plus American Public Radio’s Marketplace has a segment on JibJab’s marketing strategy: Online humor is a serious business.

Greg Spiridellis, a company co-founder, tells Marketplace: “The real focus for us with these big election video tent poles is to get our brand out there and also to make people aware of the other premium services that we offer.”

For $14 a year, customers can cut and paste their own digital photos into electronic cards and JibJab videos, according to Marketplace.

Today the talk is of the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas in the White House, a satirical look at all the fear tactics used against them by the right wing.

Barack Obama is wearing a turban and is in Muslim dress—reminiscent of the photo showing him in Somali tribal clothes. Michelle Obama has combed out her hair, has a rifle slung over her shoulder and is giving her husband what Fox News called a “terrorist fist-jab.”

For the finishing touches, there’s an American flag burning in the fireplace, Osama bin Laden’s portrait hangs over the mantle.

The Obama campaign does not like it.

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the cariacture Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” his spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

I’m not sure about tasteless and offensive. I think it does exactly what the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, says it does: It skewers Obama’s supposed lack of patriotism and being soft on terrorism, his wife’s alleged radicalism.

I think it’s funny. But of course, there’s a stubborn group of people who insist on believing Barack Obama is Muslim no matter what. A Newsweek poll released on Friday found that 12 percent of the people say he was sworn in as a U.S. senator on a Quran. Twenty-six percent continue to say he was raised as a Muslim.

So you can understand why the Obama camp might not like this cover.

Scrawled in the grime on the back of a truck on the Major Deegan Expressway:

“Honk for Obama 08”

Today I wrote about Joseph Dwyer, an army medic who appeared on the front page of USA Today in what became one of the iconic images of the Iraq War.

He was made famous by the picture, in which he runs with an injured Iraqi boy in his arms, and I’m sure for many, it was emblematic of the good the United States can do. Especially compared to other photos from this war, the ones from Abu Ghraib among them.

But Dwyer suffered from post traumatic stress disorder and was never able to shake his anxiety and depression and late last month he died.

For those of you who don’t remember Dwyer, here he is:

PHOTO: By Warren Zinn, AP via Army Times
PFC Joseph Dwyer, then 26, from Mt. Sinai, NY, carries Ali who was injured during a heavy battle between the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment and Iraqi forces on March 25, 2003 near the village of Al Faysaliyah, Iraq.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hold their first joint fund-raisers to benefit Obama tonight and tomorrow in New York City.

But today the New York Times reports on tensions between the two camps and the lack of enthusiasm among Obama fund-raisers to help Clinton retire her $23 million in debt.

Reportedly they have amassed less than $100,000.

There remains lots of resentment among Clinton supporters who believe their candidate was poorly treated during the long primary. Likewise among Obama supporters angry she stayed in the race so long.

Tomorrow morning especially will be interesting, a Women for Obama breakfast with Clinton.

Meanwhile, here’s a clever t-shirt modeled by James Jeanty.

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Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s former strategist and communications director, has signed with Fox News as a contributor.

If you think that’s an odd match-up, consider that Wolfson told the New York Times that he thought Fox’s coverage during the primary was the comprehensive, fair and even-handed.

And the Clinton campaign did complain about press coverage in favor of Sen. Barack Obama.

“Howard was part of the inner working circle of Senator Clinton’s campaign and has a unique perspective on just how unconventional this election year already is,” John Moody, an executive vice president at Fox, said in a statement.

Wolfson continues as a partner at the Glover Park Group, a political and media consulting group.

He makes his debut tomorrow.

Over the weekend, I saw Wall-E and it is as charming and inventive as you’ve heard—the first half more than the second.
Wall-E is a delightful robot still compacting trash hundreds of years after humans have abandoned the polluted Earth for space.

Here’s the start of Roger Ebert’s review:
Pixar’s “WALL•E” succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story. . . .(H)ere is a film, like “Finding Nemo,” that you can enjoy even if you’ve grown up. That it works largely without spoken dialogue is all the more astonishing; it can easily cross language barriers, which is all the better, considering that it tells a planetary story.

But don’t tell that to some conservatives.
Here’s Shannen Coffin from National Review Online’s The Corner:
“From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It’s a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however. Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are. There’s no hope for mankind. Hand over your wallet.”
And Greg Pollowitz on National Review Online’s Planet Gore:
“It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment.”

Afteward I couldn’t help but notice all the trash all around — on the sides of the roads, on the sidewalks. And the haze that engulfed the New York City skyline by the end of the weekend.

Independence Day weekend in Connecticut.         PHOTOS from Terri and Molly O’Donnell 

“NVIROCAR”

A license plate on—what else?—a Prius.