Actually, that’s unfair to Howie. The entire front page of today’s Boston Herald is sort of cartoonish (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):
Start with the don’t-watch-without-Howie warning. His must-read column – “It’s lights, camera . . . and drool all over Obama” – is just more of the same: the Chris Matthews tingle up his leg, the limousines, Granny Warren, and, of course, this zinger:
How can it be that Mitt Romney putting his dog in a crate on the roof of his car is approximately 100 times as big a story as Barack Obama actually eating one in Indonesia?
Talk about predictable: Carr has essentially moved beyond the formulaic into the algorithmic.
At the bottom of Page One, you’ll find the predictable self-promotion lower left, and the not so predictable self-promotion lower right.
The former:
Debate dominates local airwaves, Web
A stunning 338,000 viewers tuned into the UMass Lowell/Boston Herald U.S. Senate debate Monday night on Ch. 7, WHDH-TV, easily trouncing all the competition on the other stations.
The live-stream of the debate also generated more than 155,000 total streams and was viewed nationwide and in Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Italy, France, South Africa and the Russian Federation, among other places.
“It’s just amazing. We’re delighted with the incredible viewership all over the world,” said UMass Lowell Chancellor Martin T. Meehan, who added he was bombarded with calls from former colleagues in Congress about the debate.
The latter:
Faceoffs in need of a facelift
Tear down the podiums. Toss out the time limits. Make the candidates squirm. Let a live audience watch.
It’s a formula that made the Herald-sponsored U.S. Senate debate at UMass Lowell so compelling, and it should be a model for future political showdowns — especially the presidential faceoffs starting tonight.
But that’s not really the surprising part. This is: “The Senate debate on Monday night showed what happens when a world-class questioner such as David Gregory of NBC’s “Meet the Press” is allowed to push the candidates to explain their positions and cut them off if they’re not answering.”
Joe Battenfeld is definitely swimming upstream in that take on Gregory’s moderating chops. (See here for opposite impressions.)
But, hey, that’s what makes horse races.
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 
[…] There’s something entirely cartoonish about the Boston Herald’s front page today. Details at IGTLTDT. […]
Howie goes through the motions in his newspaper collyume; he goes through the motions during his show on antique-modulation radio. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was inspired to write the novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” by reports of frogs’s legs twitching even after being amputated from itheir hosts by passage of electric current. Is it possible that Howie is “functioning” likewise?