My apologies to dotCommonweal readers for posting this publicly, but I need to communicate these journalistic guidelines to our blog contributors and am unable to send e-mail at the moment. Feel free to skip to the next post.Attention dotCommonweal writers: those who plan to cover Saturday's Stewart/Colbert rally must follow the helpful guidelines developed by the Washington City Paper. Failure to adhere to these rules may result in your stories being heavily edited, deleted, or mercilessly mocked behind your back.

1. You may attend the rallies in a non-participatory fashion.2. However, because the rallies are comic events, you may not laugh.3. The act of not laughing, though, can be just as politically loaded as the act of laughing. Therefore, staffers are advised to politely chuckle, in a non-genuine manner, after each joke.4. To avoid any perception of bias, please make sure to chuckle at all jokes, whether or not you find them funny. As journalists, we must make sure to not allow our personal views of humorous or non-humorous to affect our public demeanor.5. Likewise, it could be devastating to our impartial reputation if our staffers were seen laughing at something that was not intended as a joke, thereby appearing to mock the entire event. If we are lucky, the comedians will have a drummer on hand whose rim-shots may be used as a cue for when to politely chuckle.

Please read and memorize the rest here. (H/T MOBS.)