Ben Domenech’s morning email newsletter, The Transom, is a year old now and I’ll amend what I said about it when it launched: It’s the single best news digest in America. Not just because it’s smart and well-focused, but because reading it isn’t an act of obligation. It’s actually fun. It’s the part of my morning reading I look forward to most.

A subscription is just $20 a year. You won’t be sorry.

My buddy Joel Engel is up to no good . . .

You may recall that last week a PR agency sent around a release saying that 50 Shades of Grey had outsold Harry Potter. Or something.

Anyway, so far as I could tell, source zero for the story was this post over at The Verge by Vlad Savov, which wasn’t worded much more clearly than the press release. I emailed Savov asking if he could clarify a bit and asking where he had gotten his data from. He didn’t respond. So I then emailed Verge editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky. He didn’t respond either.

You might think that a reporter asking if a story you’ve published has any basis in reality might get at least a perfunctory response from a news outlet. But maybe they’ve just had a really busy week. Anyway, just something for the clip file for any other reporters doing pieces about TheVerge.com.

People are pretty worked up over the moment yesterday when Andrea Saul responded to the latest Obama ad charging that Bain Capital killed a worker’s wife by saying that Romneycare would have saved the unfortunate woman. I understand why conservatives would be upset about this response, I suppose. But I have two genuine, not smart-alecky, questions:

(1) When is the last time you heard what someone on the Romney campaign was saying and thought, “Geez, that’s pretty sharp. Smart insight. He/She is a pro.”

I’ve followed the Romney operation pretty closely and only two people I’ve come across inside the campaign really impressed me. One of them was shunted out the door in reasonably short order. The other one wasn’t brought on until fairly recently.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t smart, impressive people toiling away for Romney. And it’s not to say that staffwork will win or lose the campaign. (My own belief is that once you cross a certain very low threshold for money and organization, the onus for winning a presidential campaign is really on the candidate. Either they have the vision, the magic, and the environment, or they don’t.)

All that said, it is pretty striking how a guy whose primary credential is his businessman’s ability to master an organization has surrounded himself with so many folks who seem to be more valued for something other than ability.

(2) If Romney wins, what do you think the odds really are that he’ll repeal Obamacare? Not waiver it, or starve it, or alter it–but actually go through the bloody fight of full and final repeal?

I don’t know the answer and I’m open to all sorts of arguments on this. But it strikes me that repealing Obamacare will take, under the best of circumstances, a singular focus and drive on the part of the executive. It will require both enormous rhetorical skill to build public support and political skill to cajole Congress. And, more than anything, the administration will have to be willing to endure a blood-letting from Democrats and the media.

Given all of that, and what we’ve seen from Romney and his campaign, do we really believe that, if elected, he’ll repeal Obamacare? Like I said, I don’t know. I’d like to believe it, as, I’m sure, most conservatives would. Because repealing that law is the single most important task for the next president. If he repeals it, he is a success, whatever else follows.

But if not? The great unmentionable in conservative circles right now is this simple question: Would it be better to have another term of Obama and a last-gasp, hail Mary shot at repeal in 2016 than to win the White House in 2012 only to have a Republican president who doesn’t repeal it?

Like I said, I’m not sure. Probably not, is my guess.

Courtesy of Galley Friend J.P.

Try not to lose it in your pants.

This NASA video about Curiosity’s landing sequence. Sample hotness:

* The unique problem of Mars’ really thin atmosphere.

* A supersonic parachute.

* Sky crane.

Bonus: To add to the degree of difficulty, the NASA number jockeys also positioned another satellite and worked a camera on a timer to capture the exact moment Curiosity deployed. As the kids say, hotttt.

It would be nice if someone in Bloomberg’s office–or the DA’s office–would do something about this. But then, they have to work with those guys.

Two pieces over the weekend, the first a review of David Kirby’s Death at SeaWorld in the Wall Street Journal.

The second, the Batman nerd opus. It’s not quite on the level of this: