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This is for those who say I’m too hard on Obama:
Lynnwood Blog

After Dedicating Crass Song to McCain/Palin, Jay-Z to Rally Obama Supporters in Ohio (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
The Obama campaign announced today that Jay-Z and NBA star LeBron James will hold a “Last Chance for Change” concert in Cleveland next Wednesday. The announcement about Jay-Z comes a few days after he dedicated his 2003 song “99 Problems” to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The lyrics to “99 Problems” include the famous line: “If you’re havin’ girl problems I feel bad for you son / I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.”
Yes, and that was the song Obama played at his Iowa victory rally—thereby calling Hillary Clinton a bitch.

Which is more repugnant: the misogyny or the silence about the misogny? (Heidi Li’s Potpourri )
If Senator Obama cannot make it clear that he either truly understands misogyny and its pervasiveness in American culture or that he sincerely wants to learn about it and use his political platform to oppose it with all his might, he does not deserve the votes of true humanists, people who work to rid our culture of all forms of illegitimate assaults on human dignity, including not only racism, but misogyny. His silence on the topic will cost him my vote, and I believe it should cost him the vote of anybody who expected more and better from the candidate who kept promising us a new kind of politics and a better brand of leadership.

Friday: If Obama doesn’t condemn misogyny, we will resist (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
The Democratic party has been revealed to take no real interest in the wishes of women.  18 million voters, many of them women for Hillary Clinton, were easily dismissed and their votes relegated to the circular file… They are so used to taking us for granted that they feel they don’t need to try to win us over and they have no comprehension of the damage they have done to their most faithful constituency… That is why we resist the Democratic party this year.  We want real change and we’re not going to get it with Barack Obama as president after he has unleashed the monster of sexism that lurked beneath a thin veneer of comity.  It is on his shoulders to do something about it.  We hold him personally responsible because misogyny sells and he has reaped the benefits all season long at our expense.

Mad Men Makes a Splash Bigger Than Its Ratings (AP)
Mad Men draws a slice of viewers as slender as Don Draper’s 1960s neckties, yet the TV drama unquestionably is all the rage. There was a Mad Men-themed category last week on Jeopardy! along with an online game, and a Mad Men homage is tucked like a fancy chocolate treat into the Nov. 2 Halloween episode of The Simpsons.
I wonder how big a part the blatant misogyny on Mad Men plays in its popularity among the cognoscenti. Sexism, after all, is so IN.  And so is violence.

“Get in their faces” (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
In Pittsburgh, a mugger robbed a 20 year old woman named Ashley Todd at an ATM machine. When he noted a McCain bumper sticker on her vehicle, he flew into a rage, punched her, kicked her and carved a B into her face. Also: In Seminole County, Florida, an unknown assailant shot up the home of Rog Coverly, the manager of the local McCain campaign headquarters… In Missouri, the Obama movement used Sheriffs and prosecutors to put together a “truth squad” to intimidate critics of Barack Obama. Obama makes no secret of his desire to erect a massive “civilian security force.” And the RAND Corporation was tasked with considering the best ways to implement a new domestic intelligence agency… [A] cult of personality, new tools of state repression, unfettered snooping — all point in a dangerous direction. The threat can be reduced to two words: Power and ego.
Must have been a dyslexic mugger.  He got the B backwards.  The Ashley Todd incident has now been questioned (see below), but the other incidents mentioned above have not.

UPDATE: McCain Worker ‘Confesses’ She Made Up Attack Story (Fox News)
Campaign volunteer Ashley Todd, 20, reportedly admits she lied when she claimed a ‘black man’ beat her and carved a ‘B’ in her face because she was McCain backer

Bachmann Loses Lead in MN-6 (Political Wire)
A new SurveyUSA poll in Minnesota’s 6th congressional district shows Elwyn Tinklenberg (D) edging past Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), 47% to 44%. The district had been considered safe for Republicans until Bachmann claimed liberals and other Obama supporters were anti-American in a MSNBC interview.

Republican club leader resigns over ‘Obama Bucks’ controversy (On Politics, USA Today)
The president of the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated, club in San Bernadino County, California, has resigned in the wake of reports about the “Obama Bucks” that her organization created and which caught national attention earlier this month.

North Carolina Republicans send out homophobic mailings against Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan. (Think Progress)
The North Carolina Republican State Executive Committee has sent out homophobic mailers targeting Senate candidate Kay Hagan (D), who is challenging Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R). The mailings warn that Hagan seeks to advance a “radical homosexual agenda” that includes legalizing gay marriage, removing “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and forcing the Boy Scouts to accept gay and atheist troop leaders.

With “Friends” Like These . . . (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
So I’m over at TGW [Tennessee Guerrilla Women] and I see a post on how this election may increase the percentage of women in Congress from 16% to 19% and I decide to post this comment: “I was still a kid when ‘Women’s Lib’ supposedly happened. That was damn near four decades ago. By this point women should occupy something like 45%-55% of elected offices.”

I didn’t figure that was controversial, but this morning I see this response from someone named “Zee”: “myiq! A foray here, how exciting. However…after a quick look at your webpage, you may be related to Mormons who are “good people” but the cult definitely deserves to crash and burn. I’m sorry, yeah, I hate all religions as they are mostly paternalistic crap, but some, such as Islam where they practice gender apartheid to the point where male firefighters let schoolgirls burn to death rather than TOUCH them and the MORMONS, where the men are ‘gods’ of their own planets in their ludicrous afterlife and women just part of a harem to pump out ghost babies to populate said planets, deserve all the ridicule they get and then some. ‘Tolerance’ is bullshit in these cases.”

Zee was referring to [a] post of mine, where I called out a commenter at Corrente for religious bigotry against Mormons.  here was my response to Zee: “After we round up the Moslems and Mormons, do we gas them with Zyklon-B and burn the bodies?”… Freedom of religion (which includes freedom from religion) isn’t just a liberal value, it’s a constitutional right… Bigotry, whether in the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, religious intolerance or even partisanship is WRONG.  Progressives used to have principles. Liberals still do.

Hey Barack! If McCain “Is fighting for Joe The Hedge Fund Manager” How Come That Joe Keeps Giving YOU Money? (by Uppity Woman at No Quarter)

Barack Obama…: “Let’s be clear who John McCain is fighting for — he’s not fighting for Joe the Plumber, he’s fighting for Joe the Hedge Fund Manager”… Well I was just wondering then, Barack, since we are “being clear here”: If John McCain is fighting for Joe The Hedge Fund Manager, how come Joe The Hedge fund Manager has given you so much money?

Be happy, Democrats!  Obama is running on a message similar to that of George Bush in 2000!
Former Bush Aide Backs Obama (Political Wire)
Former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said he will vote for Sen. Barack Obama in the presidential election, according to ABC News. “Said McClellan: ‘From the very beginning I have said I am going to support the candidate that has the best chance for changing the way Washington works and getting things done and I will be voting for Barack Obama and clapping… It’s a message that is very similar to the one that Gov. Bush ran on in 2000.’”

Rejoice, Democrats, your leaders won’t be doing a damn thing for you if they get elected.
Biden says no to populism (by vastleft at Corrente)
On XM satellite radio’s POTUS station, I … heard a couple of minutes of a Joe Biden speech in Winston-Salem. Mostly, it sounded fine, and more like a Democrat than a typical Obama speech does. But then, in criticizing trickle-down economics, he tossed out a trope that struck me as odd: “I’m not making a populist argument.” As if one should be relieved to hear that. Turns out, this is a theme he’s fond of… [T]he rich have long enjoyed a politics that the rest of America has not, and it should be no shame for Democrats to represent the interests of the have-nots. In fact, it used to be a source of pride.

What the landslide means in one sentence (by lambert at Corrente)
Stoller (again this morning, so sue me): “[T]he elites are swinging to the Blue Dog position rather than coming our way.” Quelle surprise… Of course, everybody knows that the Blue Dogs won’t fuck us over nearly as badly as the Republicans. They haven’t had time to figure out how, yet!

And be glad, Democrats, because manipulating your friends is now the order of the day!  Public humiliation is a great way to convert people to your cause.  Maybe we should put nonvoters in stocks in the public square.
From: Peter Koechley, MoveOn.org Political Action (via email)
Subject: Frances, you’re in this video
To: Frances
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 9:06 PM

Dear Frances,

Oversleeping. Getting the car fixed. Having to pick up the second-cousin’s stepkids on the other side of town. These are just a few of the reasons millions of Americans won’t vote on November 4th.

It’s not like they hate voting. They want to do it. They know they should. And mostly, they intend to. But some of your friends won’t get around to actually voting because they haven’t been reminded vividly enough.

That’s why we developed this funny, scary video. It shows people what it might look like if we lose the election by a single vote: theirs.

Here’s a version we prepared for you. You’re in it—seriously, you, Frances. Check it out—and if you like it, send it to your friends:

Yet more proof the press screwed Al Gore (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Lots of folks are talking about the broad, new Project for Excellence in Journalism study about the fall’s campaign coverage that concludes  coverage of John McCain had been decidedly more negative than the Barack Obama coverage in the last six weeks. According to the study of mainstream media, 57% of print and broadcast stories about the GOP nominee were negative, compared to 14 that were positive… “Winning in politics begets winning coverage,” the study concluded. Makes sense, right? Than how do we explain this additional conclusion from the study: “McCain’s numbers are almost identical to what we saw eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.” [Emphasis added.]

Somebody alert Bob Somerby, because this is just amazing. John [McCain’s] campaign has, according to the polls and even conservative pundits, been going through a slow-motion wreck for the last month. (i.e. Free fall?) And yet his press coverage is “almost identical” that of Al Gore in 2000. It’s amazing because what was Gore doing at this point in 2000? He was basically running dead even with George Bush, and in the process of winning virtually every toss-up state come Election Day. See how that correlation between performance and coverage disappeared for Gore? He was performing just as well as his opponent (and light-years better than McCain today), yet Gore got saddled with kind of coverage usually assigned to the pronounced loser.
And what does it say about the media that they give more favorable coverage to the perceived winner?  And if the media chose George Bush for us over Al Gore, what does it say about them, and about us, that the media are now pushing Barack Obama?

Politics as Entertainment (Political Wire)
A new Entertainment Weekly survey has found that six in 10 Americans have found the presidential election to be entertaining, so much so that the 18-24 year-olds surveyed estimate they spend one-third of their TV time watching election coverage. Interesting: “More than half of Americans (53%) feel celebrity endorsements can have some influence on the candidates’ appeal. Those 25-34 (59%) and Democrats (64%) are more likely to feel that celebrity endorsement has influence on the candidates’ appeal.”

In Driving Election-Year Dynamics, Television Still Reigns Supreme (Los Angeles Times)
Mary McNamara: Not since the Kennedy-Nixon race has television played such a significant role in a presidential election. The Saturday Night Live skewerings, the David Letterman-John McCain feud, the political meltdowns on The View, the Gov. Sarah Palin interviews, the Joe the Plumber interviews, Obama’s World Series lead-in (if there’s a Game 6) and, of course, the debates.

Networks Going Big on Election Night (Variety)
Given the enormous interest in this year’s presidential election, the broadcast and cable nets have concocted supersized plans for their election night coverage. The nets aren’t adding much more time to the already wall-to-wall coverage they provided in 2004, but this year’s telecasts promise a bit more heft.

Sarah Palin: Future Media Star? (Hollywood Reporter)
As polls cast doubt on the McCain-Palin ticket, producers and agents are discussing possibilities for capitalizing on Sarah Palin’s fame, ranging from an Oprah-style syndicated talk show to a Sean Hannity-like perch in cable news or on radio. “Any television person who sees the numbers when she appears on anything would say Sarah Palin would be great,” said a veteran morning-show producer.

Obama Snubs Smiley? (Marketwatch)
Tavis Smiley doesn’t expect presidential candidate Barack Obama to agree to come on his PBS late-night talk show before the election. “The odds are slim to none — and slim is out of town,” Smiley said. He has received his share of flak from some African-Americans because they were unhappy with his professional posture toward Obama. He hasn’t given the Democrat a free pass during the campaign.
Smiley dared to call out Obama for not attending his conference in New Orleans earlier in the year.  Hillary attended, Barack did not.

Camp Followers (by Patrick Buchanan)
Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media. Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them. Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin. Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama… This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush… If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know…

The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all. Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent? “Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate crime charges… Is there a media double standard? You betcha.
Teeth must be chattering in hell.  It has to be freezing down there when I find myself agreeing with Pat Buchanan.

Campbell Brown: Stop Covering Palin’s Wardrobe Controversy; Women Are Unfairly Held to Higher Standard on Appearance (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
On CNN [Wednesday] night, Campbell Brown discussed the “sniping…about Sarah Palin’s clothes. Politico.com reports that the Republican National Committee spent more than $150,000 on clothes, hair, and makeup for Palin on the campaign trail. “Now, these are not your tax dollars. This is money given by Republican donors to the RNC,” Brown said. “But the report questions whether it’s legal to use campaign cash for quote,’ personal use.’ My issue: there is an incredible double standard here, and we’re ignoring a very simple reality. Women are judged based on their appearance far, far more than men. This is a statement of fact. There has been plenty of talk and plenty written about Sarah Palin’s jackets, her hair, her looks. Sound familiar? There was plenty of talk and plenty written about Hillary Clinton’s looks, hair, pantsuits. Compare that to the attention given to Barack Obama’s $1,500 suits or John McCain’s $520 Ferragamo shoes. There is no comparison.”

Palin Derangement Syndrome and Those Who Suffer From It (by Ani at No Quarter)
So there I was the other day, invited into a political debate via email, painstakingly composing all sorts of facts, figures and associations of Obama that would certainly give any reasonable person pause. You know the litany: 130 present votes, 6 wrong votes, reneging on FISA, NAFTA, public financing, women’s rights, don’t ask don’t tell, Iraq, Israel. Bitter Gate. Sweetie Gate. I mention ACORN, the Fannie and Freddie scandal, caucus fraud, Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, Rezko Auchi, Pleger, Meeks, Pritzker, Khalidi, Al Mansour and the piece de resistance, picking the bloviating, endlessly gaffe prone – Joe Biden. Wow, what judgment, Barack!!!! I send facts and figures together with, I must say, a rather cogent argument.

They counter with: McCain will croak in office within two months and Palin, spawn of the devil, will be President and ship us all back to the stone age.

Palin: ‘I don’t know’ if abortion clinic bombers are ‘terrorists.’ (Think Progress)
In her interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that Bill Ayers is “no question” a terrorist because he sought to destroy the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Palin, however, refused to apply the same label to abortion clinic bombers: “Q: Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist, under this definition, governor? PALIN: (Sigh). There’s no question that Bill Ayers via his own admittance was one who sought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There’s no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that uh, it would be unacceptable. I don’t know if you’re going to use the word terrorist there.”
Click through to watch the video.

Weatherman Undergound Agent Discusses WU’s Plans For Re-education ….and Genocide (by Uppity Woman at No Quarter)
Larry Grathwohl was an underground agent who infiltrated Bill Ayers’ Weather Undergound movement. Here he discusses what would happen next after they overthrow the USA government. “… And they were dead serious”. So, do too many MSMers and Democrats still think that an affiliation for years with Bill Ayers is a harmless little thing?
Click through to watch the video.

McCain Adds NASA Funding To List Of Exemptions From His Spending Freeze (Think Progress)
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) frequently faults “wasteful spending” and “earmarks” as contributing to the current economic crisis, and has campaigned on a promise to take a “hatchet” to the federal budget and to impose a spending freeze on all non-essential government spending. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that, in an effort to court Florida voters, McCain has now pledged to increase funding for NASA, a major employer in the state.

Palin Betrays Base On Immigration Amnesty (by Cernig at Crooks and Liars)
With 12 days to go until the election, today was the wrong time for Sarah Palin to shoot herself in the foot and alienate her base. But that’s what she has done, in style, on Univision. “Interviewer: To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants? Palin: I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country.” Needless to say, the wingnuts, those few mentioning it so far, are not at all happy.
It’s funny, but I have yet to see reporting on any of Obama’s or Biden’s inconsistencies or panderings on either Think Progress or Crooks and Liars.

Wisconsin Judge Tosses Lawsuit Challenging Voter Registrations (American Constitution Society)
A Wisconsin judge dismissed a lawsuit today aimed at forcing state election officials to use the Social Security database to check voters’ registrations, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The lawsuit was lodged against the state’s Government Accountability Board by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who also serves as the co-chair of Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain’s Wisconsin campaign. The state’s Republican Party also joined Van Hollen in the case. Their lawsuit alleged that federal law required Wisconsin election officials to make sure voters’ registration information matched information on driver’s licenses and Social Security records.

Judge Maryann Sumi concluded that Van Hollen failed to show that Wisconsin officials had violated the federal Help America Vote Act and that the Wisconsin Republican Party had no standing to be involved in the case.
If the law wasn’t broken, that’s one thing.  But how can it be that the Republican Party has no standing to demand that elections be fair?

Bloomberg cleared to run for a third term. (Think Progress)
The New York City Council voted [Thursday] to extend term limits so that Mayor Michael Bloomberg can run for a third term next year. The council’s vote of 29 to 22 undoes the result of two voter referendums that had imposed a limit of two four-year terms for the Mayor’s office… The New York Times reports that after Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum announced the final result, the balcony in the Council chamber “erupted in shouts of ‘The city’s for sale!’ and ‘Shame on you!’”

‘I made a mistake,’ admits Greenspan (Financial Times, U.K.)
Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said on Thursday the credit crisis had exceeded anything he had imagined and admitted he was wrong to think that banks would protect themselves from financial market chaos. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” he said.
At least he admitted to a mistake.  At the same congressional hearing, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said that the problem was too many congressional committees!

Greenspan Follies: The World Is as Ayn Rand Would Have Predicted (by Dean Baker)
What would Ayn Rand expect to happen? On the one hand we have the hot shot executives, on the other hand the schmucks who own stock in these banks. Would Ayn Rand expect that the executives would put aside their ambition, their lust for success, their greed, in order to benefit shareholders who are too dumb to even know what a credit default swap is? Not for a second; Ayn Rand would watch the Wall Street big boys run roughshod over their shareholders’ interests and be applauding them every step of the way. That is how the game is played… Calling them, or their patron Alan Greenspan, free market ideologues is far too generous.

Not So Very Brilliant (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
How many bloggers managed to see this before Greenspan did? It really had nothing to do with intelligence. It had to do with the narrow ideological prism through which Greenspan and his minions viewed the world. In other words, it had more to do with their emotional identification with a certain philosophy that blinded them to everything else. Liberals are often ridiculed for not having a firm ideological foundation, but that’s just not true. We like to do what will actually work, and that leaves us with a much wider array of options.
Oh, would that it were true, Susie.  What I see among so-called liberals is a blind devotion to a person, shedding every single ideal they ever professed to have to shove him in our faces.

Rove Blames Market Volatility On Obama: It Reflects ‘People’s Concerns’ About An Obama Presidency (Think Progress)
[Thursday] on Fox News, host Neil Cavuto asked Karl Rove to explain today’s “very volatile markets.” Rove responded by claiming that it was a result of people’s uncertainty over an Obama presidency: “ROVE: But we have to be a little bit careful here, because markets try and predict the future. And what they may be doing here, this volatility may be people’s concerns about what would happen if Barack Obama, who has a lead in the polls and has been deemed by the media to be the likely next president of the United States, what would happen to their economy and their portfolios if he were to become president?”… Rove also claimed that investors were nervous about Obama’s “anti-business attitude,” pointing to how he would “raise the capital gains tax, which will take some value out of the market.”
Click through to watch the video.

The ice floe cometh (by vastleft at Corrente)
Would someone more expert than I about Social Security and Medicare please take a crack at Newsweek’s Robert J. Samuelson’s “Young Voters, Get Mad — You need to appeal to the shame and guilt of older Americans”?
And when they do get mad, we must take every opportunity to remind them that ROBERT J. SAMUELSON HELPED GEORGE BUSH STEAL OUR PRE-PAID RETIREMENT FUND.

How the Economy Literally Makes You Sick (by a little night musing at Corrente)
That was the front-page header given to [an] AP article in today’s Metro (freebie newspaperlet). “The ailing economy is leading many Americans to skip doctor visits, skimp on their medicine, and put off mammograms, Pap smears and other tests. And physicians worry the result will be sicker patients who need more expensive treatment later.”… Say it with me! We can’t afford NOT to have single-payer.

Media Matters for America headlines

• AP uncritically reported false McCain claim that under Obama’s tax plan, “people who pay no taxes would receive a $500 tax credit”

• LA Times, AP repeated McCain campaign misinformation about Obama’s tax plan

• CNN’s Carroll aired Cindy McCain’s attack on Obama over troop funding without noting her husband’s own vote

• O’Reilly vows “to document every ACORN situation and any other voter fraud” but has yet to mention fraud complaints against YPM

• CNN’s Crowley cropped Obama quote, omitting his assertion that “[w]e’re going to have to fight” every day until election

• Savage: “Why should a welfare recipient have the right to vote? They’re only gonna vote themselves a raise”

• In falsely accusing Obama, Fox News’ Brown misrepresented reason McCain gave for initially opposing Bush tax cuts

• LA Times reported that McCain “has not budged” from balance budget pledge but didn’t report that his chief economic policy adviser has

• Wash. Times reported McCain claim about Obama’s response to Lewis statement without reporting what Obama actually said

• Wash. Post cropped Obama’s “we’ve got a righteous wind at our backs” remark to exclude “but we’re going to have to work”

• Hannity falsely claimed Obama “said” he is “going to … cut tens of billions of dollars in our military”

U.S. ranks 36th on press freedom list. (Think Progress)
Reporters Without Borders today released its annual Press Freedom Index. Despite purporting “to be a beacon for the rest of the world” for human rights protections and freedom of thought, the U.S. has been ranked 36 out of 173 countries — a spot also shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina. Iceland ranked number one in press freedom, with Ghana, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, and Jamaica also ranking higher than the U.S. The report singled out “wars carried out in the name of the fight against terrorism” as a cause for the steep decline in press freedoms around the world.

AP Backs Down On Controversial Rate Plan: Cuts Rates, Gives Members All AP Text, Halts ‘09 Increases (Paid Content)
In a major turnabout, the Associated Press has just reversed course on its controversial rate plan following a board meeting today. The co-op, facing defections from members large and small, will cut member assessments by another $9 million next year, for a total of nearly $30 million—and will start an examination of its member structure that could result in a complete overhaul. The board voted to issue a moratorium for the papers—a minority of AP members—facing cost increases next year and unwound a provision of the new plans that would have made some AP text content, including enterprise, columns and some sports and entertainment features, premium. AP Rate reductions will be considered for AP Broadcast members as well.

Editors React To AP Rate Cut: ‘A Good Starting Point’ Or ‘This Changes Nothing’ (Paid Content)
The Associated Press’ decision to revise its controversial member pricing plan received a mixed reaction from editors at newspapers that have submitted notices asking to exit the fold in two years. Editors appear keen to listen, but no one is willing to say this is a mind-changer. Still, the papers have achieved their first goal: getting the AP to take their concerns seriously and getting a break on their membership fees. And it’s worth pointing out that the cancellation notices only represent a fraction of the over 1,500 AP members.

Bono to Write Op-Eds for NYT
New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal has announced his first acquisition for the paper’s Op-Ed pages for 2009: Bono. Yep, Bono. The activist-creator of Zoo TV will pen between six and ten pieces for the Grey Lady next year, Rosenthal told students Wednesday night at Columbia’s School of Journalism.

NYT Co. 3Q Profits Down 51%, Beats Estimates
The New York Times Co. reported Thursday that its third-quarter profit skidded 51 percent lower but still beat Wall Street estimates as the newspaper industry continues to suffer from advertising reductions accelerated by a worsening economy. Early numbers from the current quarter indicate that slow ad sales at the Times newspaper and other properties are likely to continue.

Moody’s May Cut New York Times Into Junk Territory
Moody’s Investors Service said on Thursday it may cut its ratings on New York Times Co. into junk territory, citing concerns about continuing revenue declines and risks associated with refinancing its debt. The New York Times posted a quarterly loss from continuing operations on Thursday and said advertising revenue at its news media group dropped 16 percent for the quarter.

Hearst Heiress Bashes Family Biz
Lydia Hearst is trashing her own family’s media empire for continuing to live large during the financial meltdown. “Hearst Corporation, which my family owns, continues to host parties even as it folds magazines like CosmoGirl,” the heiress writes. “It seems excessive. … At least Hearst recently cancelled the company Christmas bash. It’s time to work through this crisis, not party through it.”

Slowing Fast Company?
While layoffs and hiring freezes are the topic du jour at media companies across New York City, Mansueto Ventures remains a bright spot in the industry. According to PIB, Fast Company sold roughly $29 million in ad pages between January and September, a change of 37.3% over last year. Another Mansueto title, Inc., sold roughly $64 million in ad pages, a change of 10% over last year.

‘Major’ Layoffs at Time Inc.’s Southern Progress Magazines
Layoffs one tipster calls “major” have hit Southern Progress Corporation, the Time Inc. subsidiary that publishes Southern Living, Cooking Light, and Coastal Living, among others. A Southern Progress spokeswoman said, “Of course we’re sad to be losing good people. It was an unfortunate but necessary decision based on challenging economic conditions in our industry.”

Al Primo’s Eyewitness Revolution
James Brady: In 1968, a buccaneering young TV news director out of Pittsburgh via Philadelphia came to New York, and within six months was violently shaking the evening news show of the city’s local WABC, introducing a startling new format, firing people, hiring a bunch of talented kids, and launching what he called Eyewitness News. Local TV has never been quite the same.

In Downturn, Publishers Go ‘Beyond the Page’
Magazine publishers across the industry are struggling to build — even maintain — print advertising pages. According to Publishers Information Bureau’s third quarter report, ad pages fell 12.9 percent for the quarter, and were down 9.5 percent year-to-date over the same period in 2007. However, some publishers managed to grow print pages and revenue — many by double digits

Google’s New Trick For Getting People To Sit Through Its Video Ads? Biometrics (Paid Content)
It’s not hard to find people who will say that video ads are annoying, but marketers want to know just how annoying they really are. Or, as they might put, at what point viewers get so irritated they turn them off. Leah Spalding, ad research manager for Google, tells Mediaweek that the search giant plans to use biometrics—which can involve attaching sensors on testers’ heads, pupil dilation and skin response and is typically used to test individuals for conditions like Attention Deficit Disorder— to go beyond click-through rates as a way to determine the value of its InVideo Ads, which are served on YouTube.

Gmail for Mobile Gets Offline Support (Mashable)
Gmail’s mobile application is getting a useful upgrade today. You can now compose and send emails when in a low/no coverage area and have them automatically delivered in the background when you regain a signal… Along with the offline support, Gmail has added a few other features. Most notable is the ability to switch between multiple Gmail/Google Apps accounts from the Gmail Mobile interface. There are also shortcut keys for performing basic functions like jumping to the top or bottom of your mailbox, or undoing your last action.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Which of These Two Mama’s Boys Are You Going to Vote For? (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Writing in the Wall Street Journal [Wednesday], Sue Shellenbarger quotes Doug Wead, author of two books on presidential families, noting that both Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., fit a certain presidential pattern of “Mama’s boys with absent fathers who were perceived by the sons as high achievers.” Obama’s tale is more complicated, because in addition to being abandoned by his father, Barack Obama Sr., at the age of two, his mother also left Obama Jr. in the care of her parents while she went off gallivanting around the world… Do you need to have grown up in a dysfunctional home, without the love of two parents, in order to become a successful presidential candidate?
Come to think of it, the current President Bush is also a mama’s boy with an absent father.

Avedon finds a way to vote for Obama (by vastleft at Corrente)
“I tried not to think about it while I was doing it.” Wouldn’t work for yours truly. I’d still be wondering what the part that wasn’t thinking wasn’t thinking of.
Don’t think of a donkey—or an ass.

Obama lead on McCain grows to 12 points (Reuters)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Barack Obama’s lead over Republican rival John McCain has grown to 12 points in the U.S. presidential race, with crucial independent and women voters increasingly moving to his side, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

AP poll: McCain, Obama all even in homestretch (Baltimore Sun)
Race has tightened since third debate, poll suggests, with McCain gaining among whites, people earnings less than $50,000 The presidential race tightened after the final debate, with John McCain gaining among whites and people earning less than $50,000, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that shows McCain and Barack Obama essentially running even among likely voters in the election.
So which is it?  Is Obama ahead by 12 points, or is the race even?  Zogby is in the tank for Obama and the AP has given a lot of help to McCain, so we can’t know for sure what’s really happening.

Obama Tells Virginia Supporters of ‘Righteous Wind At Our Backs’ (by Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller at Political Punch, ABC News)
LEESBURG, VA — “I cant imagine a more beautiful setting for us to be thinking about the last 13 days,” said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., this evening in Northern Virginia… “If you’ll stand with me, then I know that we can win Virginia and we can win this election and we can finally bring the change we need to Washington,” Obama told the estimated crowd of 35,000. “I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here.”
So are we to assume that McCain is not righteous?  Or Sarah Palin?  I HATE this kind of talk.  It can lead to people being killed over stupid religious differences.

Biden Speaks in Tongues; Obama Translates (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
For those of you who are periodically perplexed by Joe Biden’s glossolalia, help is on the way. Barack Obama is now helpfully translating Biden’s rapturous utterances into English so that the rest of us can comprehend them.  Remember Biden’s statement earlier this week which appeared to the untrained ear to be about how the terrorists would “test” the new rookie president, Obama?… Well, Obama “clarified” this today. It appears that we were all wrong – what we thought was an unambiguous statement that Obama would specifically be tested because he was young and inexperienced was really a generic statement about ANYONE who happened to be elected, McCain or Obama. Or Nader or Barr too, I guess. [Click through for] Obama’s “W.O.S.B.R.M” (What Obama Says Biden Really Meant) statement.
But it’s Palin we’re supposed to be afraid of.  Don’t forget that, now—Palin, SCARY; Joe, NOT scary.

Palin Shopping Spree Legal? Yes, but Barely (ABC News)
When news broke that Gov. Sarah Palin and her family managed to spend $150,000 of other people’s money on clothes after joining the McCain ticket, many scratched their heads. Is that legal? Thanks to a loophole in federal law the answer, experts say, is yes. Handily, the loophole was codified into law by the landmark campaign finance law passed by her ticketmate, Sen. John McCain. It would be illegal for the McCain-Palin campaign to buy a new wardrobe for Palin and her husband, say campaign finance lawyers contacted by ABCNews.com. But the law is silent on whether such purchases can be made by the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“Barely” legal?  Is there such a term?  Isn’t there only legal or illegal?  Can you be “barely” pregnant or “barely” dead?  Honestly, these attempts to sabotage candidates in supposed news articles are just astounding.  And notice the blame attributed to McCain through his sponsorship of the campaign finance reform law.  As if McCain planned to buy a wardrobe for a future running mate and purposely wrote that ability into the law.  As Calculated Risk used to ask, why, oh why, don’t we have a better press corps?

Tax Expert: Palin Has to Declare Clothes (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
I just got off the phone with a well-respected and well-known tax attorney who doesn’t want to be identified. I asked him earlier in the day whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin can avoid paying taxes on the $150,000 worth of clothes the RNC bought her, as she and the RNC maintain. (They said the RNC now owns the clothes; she’s just borrowing them.) He said that, after consulting with a number of experts at his prominent firm, he thinks the RNC and Gov. Palin are wrong. “It’s probably not a ‘gift,’” he said… “The consensus view is she would have to count the wardrobe as income at least in the amount of the fair value of the rental of the wardrobe,” he said.
And Obama may owe taxes on the favorable deal he got on his mansion purchase, thanks to Tony Rezko.  Does anyone know how to get in touch with Tapper?  I’d like to tell him about the mansion deal.

Commentary: If Palin didn’t look good, we’d criticize (by Merlene Davis, Lexington Herald-Leader)
I think Palin looks quite good in her clothing, and her hair and makeup are spot-on all the time. So the investment seems to be paying off. Plus — let’s speak frankly, ladies — if Palin appeared at stump location after stump location wearing some of those outfits she was pictured wearing in Alaska, some of us would be talking more about that than about the words coming out of her mouth. You know that.

Alaska funded Palin kids’ travel (AP)
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business. The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel… Alaska law does not specifically address expenses for a governor’s children. The law allows for payment of expenses for anyone conducting official state business.

Palin: ‘Women Need Equal Pay For Equal Work,’ Not Just ‘A Talking Point’ (Think Progress)
[Tuesday], Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) held a rally in Henderson, NV, during which she made a direct appeal to women voters. During the speech, she claimed that it was McCain who embraced equal pay for equal work, and charged Obama with underpaying the women on his staff. Discussing the help working women need, Palin declared, “Women also need equal pay for equal work. And not just be a talking point.” It is true the women on McCain’s staff on average make more money than the women on Obama’s staff, but it is because “McCain has more women in senior, higher-paid positions — not that women [on Obama’s staff] are being paid less than men for the same job.” McCain can be rightfully praised for employing women in higher positions, but to claim that Obama pays his staffers unfairly is an outright lie. More importantly, Palin’s claim that working women would have an “advocate” in a McCain-Palin White House requires completely ignoring McCain’s record of opposing equal pay.
So who should we trust, the candidate who opposes legislation on equal pay but has more highly paid women working on his campaign, or the candidate who claims to be in favor of legislation for equal pay (at least I think Obama claims that as his most recent stance on the issue), but who can’t seem to find qualified women for the  highly paid positions in his campaign?

Ripping the Sexism Out of Our News Coverage (by Alegre)
No one should have to endure what Hillary went through in this year’s election. Thankfully, a group of over 100 journalists down in Argentina have laid the foundation to a lot of the work ahead of us here at the Corner… With the help of the Internet, I’m hoping we can encourage our own press and those in the MSM to take some of this to heart when they report on things that affect women and girls right here at home. After all, words have power and they control so much of what’s put out there… [Reporting facts] – protecting the victim or her family – respect.  Folks a lot of this is just journalism 101 here.  Whether it’s a murder, rape, domestic violence or whatever some things are always important in getting the story right, especially if you want to avoid inflicting further harm on innocent people.
Click through for details.

Hatin’ Palin (by Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page)
The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation’s mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve. It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko’s bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: “I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge impact. People connect to her.” Uh-oh. Sounds like the cancer could be in remission.

McCain Tries to Push Past Palin Backlash (Washington Post)
Sen. John McCain campaigned across Ohio with Sarah Palin at his side Wednesday, drawing energized crowds of GOP partisans while his campaign dismissed the latest controversy over his running mate as coming from elitists and not representing the opinions of average Americans.
And it’s both the conservative AND the so-called liberal elites who hate her.  Which is one of the reasons I like her.  Would never vote for her, but I like her.

Joe the Plumber has hurt Obama in Florida, new poll finds (McClatchy)
Make way Barack Obama and Sarah Palin — it looks like there’s another polling phenomenon in Florida: The Joe the Plumber Effect.

Obama sees desperation in McCain’s reliance on ‘Joe’ (McClatchy)
GREEN, Ohio — John McCain’s campaign continued to hammer away at Barack Obama’s economic plan Wednesday, with Sarah Palin calling him “Barack the wealth-spreader,” while Obama said their attacks smelled of desperation.
Obama sees desperation everywhere but in his own campaign.  Remember when it was Hillary who was desperate, who was just hanging on by her fingernails, as she rolled over him in the later primaries?

McCain targets `Joe the Plumber’ across Florida (AP)
Republican John McCain is trying to keep Florida from swinging to the Democrats with a cross-state bus tour and a series of “Joe the Plumber” events aimed at blue-collar workers.
McCain obviously has a populist thing going, and that’s why Palin is an asset to him, regardless of what the Washington elites think.

Palin asks: Why did the person with 18 million votes get passed over? (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
Good question.

Breaking! The Numbers Don’t Lie (But The DNC Does) (by Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy at No Quarter)
Hot off the presses is this final report from Peniel Cronin, the author of an incredible study, “2008 Democratic Presidential Preference Election: Primary versus Caucus: How millions of voters were systematically disenfranchised and election results were skewed,” available at Dr. Lynette Long’s site, which contains a great deal of information on issues of caucus fraud. Ms. Cronin’s final study, “2008 Democratic Presidential Preference Election: The People’s Vote: Delegate Allocation Per Original Votes Cast” is an eye-opener (and is available at the bottom of this post). No Quarter is quite fortunate that Ms. Cronin is allowing US to break this story! Thank you!!

The bottom line is this – had the RBC not interfered, the difference between the PLEDGED delegates would have been – wait for it – 4 (FOUR). Yes, I said 4. And, while caucuses accounted for only 2.9% of voters, they accounted for over 14% of pledged delegates. Never even mind all of the massive caucus irregularities that benefited one person – Obama. Still, the bottom line difference: 4 delegates, AND Clinton won the popular vote.
Click through to read the entire report.

Study: Media Portrays McCain in “Substantially Negative” Light Compared to Obama (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
The Project for Excellence in Journalism looks at the coverage of the two presidential candidates since the conventions and concludes “The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one…coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time.”… The study found that 35% of the stories about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., were positive, 35% were neutral or mixed, and 29% were negative.

What if? (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
The incomparable Bob Somerby makes a very astute observation: “…[M]ake no mistake: If Clinton had run against McCain this year, this campaign would have been covered quite differently by more than a few major ‘journalists.’” Oh you betcha!… One thing is for sure, the media would still be loving them some straight-talking St. Maverick.  He wouldn’t be old, evil, or racist.  Assuming he had still chosen Sarah Palin she would be considered a smart, reform-minded candidate who was uncorrupted by Washington D.C.  She would also be getting praised as something new and exciting, a conservative, christian feminist.

Florida’s GOP lawmakers blamed for early-voting lines (McClatchy)
Saying early voting cost too much money with rules that weren’t uniform, Republican legislators led a charge three years ago to set new statewide standards limiting the number of polling sites and their hours of operation.

Wired Forum Asks Voters To Report Obstacles At The Polls (American Constitution Society)
It’s not just law and justice policy Web sites that recognize the potential for serious obstacles to a fair vote in the approaching elections. Wired’s Blog Network has launched a forum for voters to report problems they encounter when casting their ballots. The forum includes a map for voters to note the precinct they experienced difficulties. Many voters have already started voting, and the Wired forum includes voters who say they’ve had their eligibility challenged, experienced trouble with voting machines and been forced to use provisional ballots.

U.S. Election Will Cost $5.3 Billion, Center for Responsive Politics Predicts (Capital Eye)
WASHINGTON – The 2008 election for president and Congress is not only one of the most closely watched U.S. elections in years; it’s also the most expensive in history. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics estimates that more than $5.3 billion will go toward financing the federal contests upcoming on Nov. 4. The presidential race alone will cost nearly $2.4 billion, the Center predicts. Already the candidates alone have raised more than $1.5 billion since the election cycle’s start in January 2007. This is the first time that candidates for the White House have raised and spent more than $1 billion, and this year’s total is on track to nearly double candidate fundraising in 2004 and triple 2000.
Public financing of campaigns would stop this insanity.  It’s the only hope we ever have of getting the corruption out of the political process.

Big Donors Still Have Big Influence (by Marie Cocco)
[W]ho will have the new president’s ear — the person who pointed and clicked his way to a $5 donation, or the donor who polished the jewels for the $25,000 fundraising gala?… Last December, he became an original co-sponsor of legislation by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., that would have fixed the presidential campaign financing system by boosting the sums the two nominees receive. The measure also calls for doubling public funds for a candidate who stays within the system — but who confronts an opponent who has opted out and gained a daunting financial advantage. In other words, Sen. Obama supported a measure that would curtail or eliminate the very advantage Candidate Obama now exploits. Does he still support the Feingold plan? Obama’s campaign says he can’t fix a crumbling system by “embracing it in its broken state.” Once he’s president, spokesman Nick Shapiro says, he’ll keep his commitment.
You mean the way he kept his commitment to accept government funding for THIS campaign?  You mean the way he kept his commitment to stop FISA?  You mean…  Well, you know what I mean.

Um, Ma’am…Why Did You Give the Obama Campaign $174,800? And Did You Know That’s Illegal? (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
The Washington Post’s Matt Mosk and Sarah Cohen tell the story of Mary Biskup of Manchester, Missouri. Not long ago, the Obama campaign called her to ask why she donated $174,800, which was just $172,500 above the legal limit. “That’s an error,” she said. Biskup told the Post that someone must have use her name but other people’s credit cards to donate the money since no charges ever showed up on her bill. The Obama campaign says they noticed the problem on its own and refunded all the money… The sheer size of the Obama fundraising operation lends itself to this type of error, which is one of the reasons why disclosure and transparency — which the Obama campaign has studiously avoided for contributions under $200 — could have a cleansing “sunlight” affect.

No Riverbend in a Year (by Anglachel)
Riverbend, the author of the blog Baghdad Burning, has not posted for one year… For me, everything that Movement Conservatism has done wrong can be read in Riverbend’s blog. Her careful chronicle of how the normalcy of everyday life melted away is the story of the corrosive effect Bush and his backers have had on the world directly for eight years and in varying levels of intensity since Reagan. Anyone who praises Reagan and the movement he led is praising what has happened to Riverbend, her family, her friends, her country.
And that goes for Barack Obama, who loves to praise Reagan.

Private health insurance in Mass. not living up to hype ( The Grand Rapids Press, thanks to DCblogger at Corrente)
The critics point out a number of worrisome signs. First, the part of the plan that is supposed to get those who supposedly can afford insurance to pony up, is failing — mainly because the cost of the private coverage is so high. The doctors note the lowest-cost plan for a couple in their 50s costs $8,200 annually and includes a $2,000 per person deductible… Meanwhile, the private insurers are making out like bandits. Blue Cross, as the state’s largest insurer, supposedly is acquiring a surplus of more than $1 million each day. It was able to pay its outgoing CEO a $16.4 million retirement bonus. The doctors note the overhead charged by the state’s major insurers is five times higher than in the U.S. Medicare system. So much for the efficiency of private enterprise…

The doctors [who wrote the study that generated this information] calculate that a single-payer plan, “Medicare for all,” instead of this mess, would save the state $9 billion a year… What would it take to have a health financing system in the United States designed to provide you with health care and not to stick its hands into your pockets at every opportunity?
The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is another hopey-changey candidate marketed by David Axelrod.  He had his “The Candidate” moment, and now his approval rating is much lower than when he was elected.

Obama, race, and Chicago’s schools (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
I’m very proud to have published “The ultimate guide to the Ayers controversy,” a post I did not write. Some have sneered at this work: ”Okay, so Bill Ayers and Barack Obama worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. What does that matter?” The short answer is this: Truth and falsehood matter. Obama claimed that he barely knew terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama lied. NPR and other major media sources insist that McCain lies in his ads, which link Obama and Ayers. Those ads tell the truth; NPR does not. But there’s more to the story; our “ultimate guide” was incomplete. As noted earlier, the CAC — the only program that Obama ever actually ran — was, by its own admission, what the hipsters now call an “epic FAIL.” The (mostly black) youngsters involved with this educational improvement program actually fared worse than did their counterparts outside the program. But the CAC story is not just about failure. It is about race and pseudoscience.
Click through for the rest of the story.

ACORN (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
I did not want to admit it, but facts are facts: ACORN has become a criminal organization. The following video comes from CNN, which many consider biased in favor of Obama: [Click through to watch. Contrary to “facts” posted on Obama’s fight the smears website,] ACORN was indeed part of Project VOTE. Strike down Fact 3. Obama represented ACORN as a lawyer and led training sessions. Strike down Fact 2. Those training sessions also count as a strike against Fact 1. I’m particularly bothered by Brad Friedman’s continuing defense of ACORN. The offenses outlined in CNN’s investigation speak to a systemic attempt to game the election…

Let’s deal in facts, Brad: You make money from your site, and your readers are mostly progs [so-called progressives]. If you stop telling them what they want to hear, you’ll no longer be given exposure in The Guardian or on Air America. You won’t be asked to fill in for the vile Randi Rhodes. Your progressive readers will desert you. You will no longer be able to make a career of your cause. You’ll have to start filling out employment applications at the many fast food restaurants around Hollywood. That’s why you never expressed on your site the disgust you felt when the Kossacks engaged in hyperbolic bashing of Hillary Clinton.

National News Network Misses Major Piece of ACORN Investigation, Group Says (American Constitution Society)
NBC’s reporting on the FBI investigation of ACORN, the nonprofit community organizing group, has failed to note Department of Justice regulations that bar officials from talking about such ongoing investigations.
Sorry, ACS, wrongdoing by employees of DOJ doesn’t excuse ACORN’s actions.

McCain campaign paid Republican operative accused of voter fraud  (The Times, U.K., thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged… The documents show that a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party, made the payment to Lincoln Strategy, of which Mr Sproul is the managing partner, for the purposes of “voter registration”. Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.

RNC ad: “Lapse in Judgment” (The Real Barack Obama)
The RNC released the new two-minute ad “Lapse in Judgment” October 22, 2008. It revisits Barack Obama’s 20-year-plus relationship with convicted political fixer (and Obama’s personal real estate fairy) Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Palin Now Much More Media-Accessible Than Biden (by Jake Tapper, Matt Jaffe, and Imtiyaz Delawala at Political Punch, ABC News)
In the first few weeks after Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., named Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., as his running mate, the Democratic vice presidential nominee immediately became the most accessible of the four candidates… But that has all changed… It might not be hard to imagine why this has happened. Biden’s proclivity to speak his mind has provided much fodder for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Republicans — as happened this week, when Biden told contributors at a Seattle fundraiser that America’s enemies would “test” a new, young President Barack Obama.

Conversely, while Biden has an apparent embargo against fielding questions from his traveling press corps — and from his supporters — his once-reclusive Republican counterpart, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has become increasingly accessible, perhaps more so than any of the four candidates.

Obama-Loving Haters Flourishing As Well (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
We’ve written about anti-McCain arson and anti-Palin vileness before, but check out the letters written to the Los Angeles Times after Reason’s Matt Welch — no fan of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. – defended McCain from the ludicrous charge he’s a traitor. Welch writes that “nothing really prepared me for the volume and tenor of outrage when I dared suggest in a family newspaper that published reports disputing McCain’s POW heroism were, in my judgment, incorrect.” People are really becoming unhinged out there.

Report: Tierney insisted Philly Inquirer run “The Case for McCain” (Poynter)
The Inquirer endorsed Barack Obama on Sunday, but also ran a dissenting opinion. “Insiders at the paper tell me that was added at the insistence of Brian Tierney (left), a life-long Republican who also happens to be the newspaper’s publisher,” writes former Inky staffer Tom Ferrick. “Probably most of his partners in ownership of the papers are Republicans. So, the temptation would be to please them and go for McCain.”

Newsweek reporter compares covering the campaign to watching bad hotel porn (Poynter)
The scenes are almost always the same, complains Michael Hastings, with none of them too memorable.

Get real! Virtual campaign draws followers
WASHINGTON (AP) – It’s not just Earthbound voters who are intensely following the U.S. presidential campaign: The race also is a hot topic in the virtual world of Second Life. John McCain supporters and Barack Obama supporters – more accurately, the personas they have created -  in Second Life, described on its Web site as “an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its residents.” They watch the presidential debates together. They make T-shirts, banners and yard signs. They hold voter registration drives and rally on Capitol Hill.

COPS EYE ‘W.’ ROLE IN TV ANCHOR’S ATTACK (New York Post)
The cameo role of a bubbly, blond TV anchorwoman in the controversial movie “W.” is being looked at as a possible motive in her bloody beating inside her Arkansas home, authorities said [Tuesday]. Investigators are also looking into whether Anne Pressly, 26, was a random victim of a home-invasion robbery or targeted by a stalker… Pressly, who resembles conservative commentator Ann Coulter and has worked at the station since 2004, won a small role in the movie “W.”

Fox News Is Digging Deep to Field an All-Star Lineup
With the re-signing this week of Bill O’Reilly, the most successful host in cable news, to a four-year deal worth more than $10 million a year, the Fox News Channel is starting to resemble the New York Yankees. The channel has sewn up a full lineup of politically outspoken heavy hitters, and the salaries have been eye-popping.

White Powder Sent to NY Times Found to Be Harmless
The lobby of The New York Times’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan was closed for nearly four hours on Wednesday after an employee opened an envelope that contained a suspicious substance, officials at the newspaper said. The authorities determined the substance was not hazardous.

Krugman: “A lot of middle-class Americans are going to find that their middle class-ness has suddenly been taken away from them” (by lambert at Corrente)
In his recent NPR interview. He’s “fairly terrified.” And that’s why I’m so happy that Obama was in there fighting, working the phones to get the big banks the trillion they needed with the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson bill. Because it shows he’s willing to help.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you (by Paul Krugman)
The folks at Crooked Timber are having some fun with right-wing bloggers who say things like this: “Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn’t the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode?…” But why should we be surprised? Before the 2004 election, there was a lot of talk on the right about how George Soros would engineer a financial crisis to swing the election… Still, these are all marginal people, aren’t they? Saying this kind of thing, surely, would get you shunned by the sensible news media. Except it doesn’t. Just over a month ago the Washington Post gave Donald Luskin, who was one of the main proponents of the Evil Soros Conspiracy theory, space on the front page of its Outlook section to explain that the economy was doing OK.

Dean Baker:

The Recession Is Not Caused by the Credit Crunch!!!!!!!

Paulson Thinks Protectionism for Wall Street Banks Is Okay

China is More than Twice as Rich as the NYT Tells Readers

Robert Samuelson Displays Bad Logic Skills In the Washington Post

NYT Supports House Price Support Program

Bailing Out Homeowners: What Does It Mean?

Stimulus: The World Is Different in October Than it Was In January

Media Matters for America headlines

• ABC’s Wright uncritically reported McCain’s mischaracterization of Obama’s tax plan

• Reporting on McCain health-care plan, USA Today left out projection that progress on uninsured will decline after 2013

• Wash. Times uncritically reported McCain “slamm[ed]” Obama “for supporting higher taxes” without noting Obama’s plans to cut taxes

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette repeated McCain’s claim about Obama’s health-care plan without noting that it’s false

• KSFO’s Rodgers falsely claimed Obama “admits in one of his own books” that he would “stand with the Muslims” against “the Western world”

• Sowell compared Obama to Hitler, Mao, other dictators, and Jim Jones

• Dismissing fundraiser and ignoring McCain’s appearances on radio show, O’Reilly claimed “McCain has nothing to do with G. Gordon Liddy”

• Quinn: “Originally, if you didn’t have land, you didn’t vote, and there was a good reason for it”

• Radio host Grant claimed he had simply “asked” whether Obama spoke before flags with an ” ‘O’ for Obama” — but he later asserted it as fact

• AP ignored McCain’s record in reporting Palin’s attack on Obama’s troop funding vote

• McClatchy uncritically reported McCain claim that Obama “would raise taxes” on Americans like “Joe the Plumber”

• Cunningham guest Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson: “[M]ost black people today are racist”

• Hannity again denounces Obama for comments later echoed by Defense Secretary Gates

• AP uncritically reported Palin’s mischaracterization of Obama’s tax plans

• Savage on Powell endorsement: “The only people who don’t seem to vote based on race are whites of European origin”

• AP, Bloomberg ignored McCain’s reversal on immigration reform

• Boehlert: Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed

Fox’s Chernin Decries FCC Indecency Rulings
Defends TV’s Right to Broadcast Even the Not So Tasteful

AP, Review-Journal ask Nevada high court to rule against OJ judge
The Associated Press and Las Vegas Review-Journal are asking the Nevada Supreme Court to rule that the judge in the O.J. Simpson armed robbery-kidnapping trial improperly withheld jury questionnaires from the public until the trial was over and then censored portions upon release.

Fake Journalist Party Crashers
Party crashers posing as reporters are apparently trying harder to get into swanky events to get a taste of free food, and drinks, and hobnob with influential New Yorkers. About 24 fake journalists tried to get into a recent gala to raise money for poor children this year, compared to the usual five or so. The fakers also pretend to work for city newspapers or national magazines.

Media Owners Face Scrutiny as Economy Weakens
The global financial crisis threatens some of the media’s elite controlling shareholders after a decade of disappointing investment returns, a rise in investor activism, and a chaotic industry transition to the digital age. Media moguls who rose to prominence while keeping a tight grip on control of their empires have lost some cachet on Wall Street in recent years.

Lauren Rich Fine: Newspapers Should Come To Terms With Lower Margins—Then Go Private (by Lauren Rich Fine at Paid Content)
Newspapers are still profitable! In a seasonally small third quarter, McClatchy Co., against all odds, still reported positive net income… Unfortunately, continued ad revenue declines will further erode margins to the point that profitability isn’t assured. Yet, if Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy is as confident as he sounds that newspapers aren’t going out of business and really believes that the majority of the ad declines are cyclical, why isn’t he investing rather than cutting? Presumably, even when there is some form of cyclical recovery, margins for the industry will be dramatically lower than they were during the heyday. I, for one, just hope they are positive as that is good enough for an industry that matters quite a bit beyond just its economics. For an industry that well understands it serves the greater good, come to terms with lower margins. And then go private!

Murdoch Takes Issue With New Michael Wolff Bio
Last year, in the gleeful afterglow of his deal for The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch agreed to cooperate with Michael Wolff, a columnist at Vanity Fair and a longtime chronicler of the media scene, for a book about Murdoch’s career and family. Now, with about six weeks to go before publication, Murdoch has raised objections with Wolff and his publisher about portions of the book.

Divided Loyalties Seen at Viacom
Media titan Sumner Redstone’s reputation as a stickler for strong corporate governance at Viacom and CBS is coming under fire as his personal problems grow. Media watchers and Wall Street analysts say that a number of key players in Redstone’s empire find themselves potentially conflicted between Redstone’s personal interests and the interests of Viacom shareholders. WSJ: Redstone said Wednesday there’s “not a chance” he’ll sell Viacom Inc. or CBS Corp. to resolve the debt issues facing his family holding company, National Amusements Inc.

“Community newspapers have a very viable future,” says GateHouse publisher
GateHouse Media New England publisher Kirk Davis believes small, community newspapers have a competitive advantage over big metros because their locally focused content isn’t available elsewhere. But Dan Kennedy notes that over the past year, GateHouse New England has eliminated the equivalent of about 50 full-time editorial positions.

Onion News Network has international appeal
LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) – The Onion News Network, an offshoot of the satirical newspaper the Onion, will be available to online viewers across the U.K., Europe and Asia following an exclusive deal Wednesday with digital distributor MyVideoRights.com.

McClatchy CEO Pruitt: We’re Sticking With AP
The McClatchy Co. is not going to the join the chains bolting The Associated Press, chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt told analysts Tuesday. “McClatchy has recently signed a new deal with AP, so we are not part of the group that is giving notice,” Pruitt said in response to a question during a conference call to discuss McClatchy’s third-quarter earnings report.

New York Times Co. Posts Lower Profit
The New York Times Company reported a 51.5 percent decline in third-quarter profit as deeper-than-expected expense cuts could not keep pace with declining revenue.

New York Times Co. considers cutting its dividend
The payout will be reviewed “to determine what is most prudent in light of the overall market conditions,” says Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson. Investor Richard Dorfman says: “If they make a serious cut to the dividend, which I suspect they will, that will negatively impact the stock price and that will negatively impact cash flow among the Ochs-Sulzberger families” who receive $25.1 million a year in dividends.

Hearst Looking at Cuts
Hearst Magazines is trying to trim its cost structure as the publishing industry retrenches in a shrinking economy. President Cathie Black is going “floor by floor” at the Hearst Tower to trim costs — and staff positions — where possible. One title already affected is Harper’s Bazaar, which closed its Los Angeles and San Francisco sales offices on Tuesday.

Tribune’s Sun-Sentinel to print Cox’s Palm Beach Post
The move eliminates about 300 positions in the Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc. production, mailroom and transportation departments.

Unions respond to Singleton’s outsourcing remarks
MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton’s proposal “to wipe out copy desks at newspapers across the country threatens not only hundreds of jobs, but also quality and credibility — values the beleagured newspaper industry needs now more than ever,” says a statement from the Northern California Media Workers Guild, Southern California Media Guild/Local 9400, and the Newspaper Guild-CWA.

Readers Do Care if Their Magazines Are Green
Magazine readers are concerned about the environment and are already taking steps to live more sustainably, according to a survey of Hearst Magazines subscribers aged 13 and up. Almost four out of five respondents agreed that everyone should care about being eco-friendly, the survey found. 43% said they would pay more for a magazine printed on recycled paper.

Unhappy Homemmaker: Martha Feuds With New Co-CEO
A rift is developing between Martha Stewart and the newly crowned co-CEO of her company, Wenda Harris Millard. According to multiple sources close to either Stewart or Millard, the pair isn’t seeing eye-to-eye on a number of operational issues and has not yet “gotten on the same page” since Millard was named co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in June.

Sirius XM Radio Faces Sky-High Debt
Sirius, which completed a merger with XM Satellite Radio in July, is facing a serious cash squeeze. It has more than $1 billion in debt coming due next year, and it doesn’t have the money, at least not yet. Chief Executive Officer Mel Karmazin has tried to reassure investors that the company will find the necessary funding, but the questions keep coming.

Disney Tries to Keep High School Musical Fresh
As the third installment of the wildly successful High School Musical series hits theaters Friday, Walt Disney Co. is grappling with a generational challenge: how to ensure that one of its hottest properties continues to thrive even as the marquee cast prepares to move on.

Videogame makers bank on sequels
RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – Sequels may not always match up to the original in Hollywood but videogames can often get better the second or third time around.

The anatomy of the first video game
Fifty years ago, before “Pong” and “Space Invaders,” a nuclear physicist created “Tennis for Two,” a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever.

20+ Ways to Enjoy the World Series Online (Mashable)
The World Series gets started this evening, featuring the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. We’ve put together a list of more than 20 resources for enhancing your World Series experience, including real-time updates, pre-and post-game interviews, video replays, statistics and more.

Hulu Tops ESPN and CNN in Sept., According to Nielsen Online
Financial crisis or not, Americans must be entertained, dammit. That could be one reason why the economic downturn has treated Hulu well. The online video site, launched less than a year ago, has made big strides in recent months. In September, Hulu was the 6th most watched video site, clocking in more than 142 million streams.

CBS Books Adventures for Webisodes
CBS Interactive is partnering with Saturn to launch a scripted Web series starring Daphne Zuniga. The company plans eight episodes of Novel Adventures, an online series by Jonathan Prince, the creator of A&E’s The Cleaner and CBS’ Cane. Each episode will be presented for a 48-hour window on CBS.com, TheInsider.com and TV.com and then roll out across the CBS Audience Network.

Movies on Your TV: Netflix Added To Samsung Blu-Ray; CinemaNow and Jaman Added To Tivo (by Rafat Ali at Paid Content)
This movies-from-your-PC-to-your-TV thing might actually be happening, judging from the deals happening….nevermind that the consumer demand hasn’t skyrocketed. Couple of new deals through the pipeline: – Netflix is continuing on its quest to bring its online service to devices, and now it is tying up with Samsung… — Meanwhile, TiVo is also announcing a couple of deals with CinemaNow and Jaman, to allow its users to download and streams their library onto the TV sets connect to the TiVo box.

TiVo Fills Disney Hole with CinemaNow Deal
Beginning next week, most TiVo owners will be able to watch Disney movies that are loaded straight onto the PVR. A separate agreement will load independent films from Jaman.com, beginning Thursday.

Steve Jobs: Online Video in the Living Room a Hobby Market (by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins at Mashable)
No one in the technology space has truly figured out the living room. So says Steve Jobs… What Jobs fails to realize is that there is significant demand for an engaging livingroom experience which includes digital content. The major telcos and cable companies are currently engaged in a battle for who controls the livingroom experienced, with the telcos attempting to deploy broadband fiber capable of delivering the cable experience, with cable companies trying to horn in on the digital broadband markets while maintaining their position as the dominant provider of livingroom video entertainment. In their efforts to compete, though, no one has apparently had the brainstorm that price is a factor for many (if not most) consumers…

This is the primary reason why Apple hasn’t been able to come up with something that the majority of video consumers would want to put next to their set. Not only are the pricepoints far too high on the devices they do create for these purposes, but they seem to have completely ignored all the variety of ways people use their television for home entertainment… Until companies like Apple stop regarding Internet content creation as a hobby market, they’ll never be able to think in the terms required to pose a serious threat.

Comcast Starts Offering Freaking Fast 50 Mbps Internet Service
With the 50 Mbps connection users will be able to download a high-def movie (about 6 GB) in 16 minutes and a standard-definition movie (about 2 GB) in 5 minutes, says the company. 

Tina Brown on Beast, Diller, and the Elusive Nature of Buzz
“[The Daily Beast] is a completely different model [from HuffPo],” says Brown. “We are commissioning and not just trying to publish every blog that comes in as a post. It’s going through editors. It’s not people posting without an editor, it’s people writing for either a commission or a particular editor. We accept and we reject.”

Yahoo to Cut About 10% of Workers
Yahoo’s third-quarter income fell by 64 percent, to $54 million, and the company said it would lay off about 1,500 workers.

Angry online divorcee ‘kills’ virtual ex-hubby
A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher’s sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.

NeoEdge Debuts Overlay Ads for Casual Online Games (by Paul Glazowski at Mashable)
Casual gaming on the Web has grown over the past year or so to become a fairly substantial revenue generator. Of course, 2007 figures pegged the burgeoning online market at $2.25 billion to the Halo and WoW-enriched $20 billion for console and PC titles and the like. So, relatively speaking, online games rank somewhat on the small side. But entirely Web-based creations do appear to be worthwhile pursuits all the same. Billions of dollars are hard to ignore, after all. The question consistently on the minds of online entertainment developers remains one of how best to grow. NeoEdge, an ad network specializing in the field of casual games, feels in-game overlays may be one lucrative way to proceed.

Salvation Army tries text donations in Ohio
A pilot program will allow Ohioans to donate to the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle Campaign this holiday season by sending a text message to a number posted near 80 kettles in the Columbus area.

Google releases Android open-source code: company
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Google on Tuesday released the open-source code which powers its Android mobile operating system and invited outside programmers to tinker with the software to develop their own features.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Presenting: the 23/6 cheap-ass Halloween costume (23/6)
Stuck for a costume idea this Halloween? Worry no longer. All you need is a pair of scissors, a piece of string, and an overweening disregard for evolution and birth control. It’s the official23/6 Scary Mask, and it’s available for download, absolutely free! Click [here] to download a PDF, suitable for wearing, framing or setting on fire.
Provided as a public service, since the Halloween mask makers weren’t able to get Sarah masks out in time.  But honestly, she’s less scary to me than Barack.

Press Release: Obama & DNC admit all allegations in Berg v. Obama
(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 10/21/08) – Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s lack of “qualifications” to serve as President of the United States, announced today that Obama and tbe DNC “ADMITTED”, by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the Federal lawsuit. Obama is “NOT QUALIFIED” to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate. The case is Berg v. Obama, No. 08-cv-04083.
Click through to read the list of allegations that have not been answered.

Lahde Quits Hedge Funds, Thanks `Idiots’ for Success (Bloomberg)
Andrew Lahde, the hedge-fund manager who quit after posting an 870 percent gain last year, said farewell to clients… ”I was in this game for money,” Lahde, 37, wrote in a two-page letter today in which he said he had come to hate the hedge-fund business. ”The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other sides of my trades. God Bless America.”
In an aristocracy, you have incompetent people put in charge of things just because they’re related to someone with power.  This kind of favoritism is what destroyed the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire.  It destroyed France, leading to the French Revolution.  It destroyed the British Empire.  It led to revolutions in Russia and in China.  Why are we letting it happen here?

One of the reasons I like some of the contest- type reality TV shows is that they provide a way of getting recognition for people who might never receive any because of ossified and political structures designed to keep upstarts from ridiculous places like Lucky, LA and Moline, IL from interfering with the assumed natural rights of the children of the already powerful.

Barack Obama wasn’t born into the aristocracy, but has been made an honorary member.  All his life, he has been coddled by powerful people who were willing to help him further his ambitions.  And that makes him way too much like George Bush for me to be comfortable with the thought of his become president.

The Aura of Mr. Smooth (by Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist)
We are about to elect a president because of how he makes us feel, not how he makes us think. That says a bundle about an undemanding electorate. Yes, Obama has policies, and he enunciates them eloquently, and a lot of people support them; but notice is mostly taken of his delivery, not of his substance… Having aura is fine, but electing a president based on whether he or she possesses it shows curious understanding of how democracy is supposed to work.
From a commenter named spaceman: that was just a totally racist article. i bet this guys first name isnt even dennis and lets find out how much bak taxes he owes. lets get this racist
My comment: Actually, the last candidate who was elected because of feelings about him, rather than actual accomplishments, was George W. Bush. And look at how THAT turned out.  Back in 2000, people like spaceman were calling us communists for supporting Al Gore. Now they’re calling us racists for refusing to support an arrogant empty suit who happens to have light brown skin. I’m sure it’s the same people. 

What is Biden talking about? (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
What the hell is Joe Biden talking about? “‘Mark my words,’ the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. ‘It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama..’”… How does this statement not argue for John McCain being elected? If the “world” is going to throw something at us – why not have the guy who has already been tested in office? A side note: Palin said to a CNN interviewer that ”If I had said that you would have clobbered me.” The CNN reporter said “You’re right.”

Strange days, indeed… (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Something’s comin’, something bad… Biden pretty much admits that Obama’s response will piss off the Democratic base. I’m thinking military action against Iran after a terror strike on U.S. soil. That’s just a guess. In all likelihood, the Republicans also know what this “something” is. Maybe that’s why the Republicans aren’t even trying to win this thing. Better it should happen on the Democrats’ watch.

Joe Biden: Huh?! (by madamab at The Confluence)
Here’s what Joe is saying:
1) If you elect John McCain, the international community won’t be “testing” him. But if you elect Barack Obama, you’re going to have an international crisis within the first six months.
2) You’re not going to like what we do in response, but you should support us anyway, and make sure all your friends do also. In fact, no one is going to like it, and that’s what makes it right.
3) And the economy is going to suck too, so get ready for the tax hike. (Toldja!)
I must repeat, HUH?… Does the Vice Presidential nominee not remember how Bush and Cheney used this type of fearmongering against John Kerry in 2004, to great effect?… I wanna know what is in that Kool-Aid, because it’s apparently turning Joe Biden into Dick Cheney.

The Press Covering For Biden is Frightening (by masslib at Alegre’s Corner)
A few days ago, Joe Biden insisted that if elected, we WILL face a major crisis, because our enemies will want to test Barack Obama. This is relevant information for the voters… Check out the front page of the New York times or the Washington Post today. They didn’t report the story. Imagine if Palin had asserted what Biden has, but about McCain. Do you think the press would not have reported it? Frankly, that’s frightening. There is bias and favoritism and then there is the complete abdication of the responsibility of a free press. To not report Joe Biden’s stunning proclamation to the electorate falls in the latter category. This isn’t about Obama, and it’s not about McCain. It’s about us. The voters have a right to know the views and expressed opinions of those running for office. This isn’t right, it isn’t even wrong. It’s dangerous.

Obama up by double digits, but there’s still some vulnerability (Hot off the Trail, McClatchy)
Barack Obama leads John McCain by every measure, a new Pew Research Poll found Tuesday, but Obama could still be vulnerable. Nearly three-fourths say McCain is well-qualified, while 53 percent see Obama that way. And 23 percent of the electorate are considered swing voters. The poll found ” Swing voters are less likely than all voters to say that McCain would continue Bush’s policies and more likely to express confidence in McCain than Obama to handle national security issues. ” Nevertheless, Obama, the Democratic nominee, is up 52-38 percent among registered voters and 53-39 among those most likely to vote.

The Power We Are About to Inherit (by paradox at The Left Coaster)
Booman at Booman Tribune raises a point in a post about realignment that has been on my mind a lot lately: if the Presidential and Congressional races turn out as currently forecast, will the Democrats truly be unaware of their mandate for change and reach for too little?
My comment: HA ha ha ha ha ha ha. HA ha ha ha ha ha ha. HA ha ha ha ha ha ha. HA ha ha ha ha ha ha. HA ha ha ha ha ha ha. If we wanted a DEMOCRAT as president, we would have nominated Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama.

Well, that’s done … (by Sarah at Corrente)
Didn’t vote the straight ticket after all.
Be careful about writing in Hillary’s name, though.  In some states it may end up being counted as a vote for someone else.  Check your state’s rules at WriteHillaryIn.com.

Our long national nightmare isn’t over (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
Election day is two weeks from today, but we already lost. Seriously, no matter who wins on November 4th, we lost…  I have no illusions about John McCain.  He will be a bad choice, and the best we can expect is that he will be a mediocre President during a time of crisis. But Barack Obama is worse.  He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with an empty resume and the worst traits of George W. Bush.  His election will be a setback for liberal politics and a disaster for the Democratic party.  He will cause Democrats to lose seats in Congress (and possibly control of the Senate) in 2010 and will allow the GOP to retake the White House in 2012.  We can expect four years of gridlock, scandals, right-of-center policies, ineffective crisis management and a failed Presidency.

Obama Started Month With Huge Money Edge (Political Wire)
Sen. Barack Obama began October with nearly $134 million in the bank, the AP reports. In contrast, Sen. John McCain started the final stretch of the campaign with $47 million. “Both candidates are also getting help from their respective parties. The DNC had $27.4 million in hand at the end of the month. The RNC said it had $77 million. That helps close the gap, but Democrats still hold a considerable $37 million advantage.” Key point: “Obama’s $5 million-a-day fundraising rate has likely continued in October and will widen the financial gap between the two sides.”
So why isn’t Obama farther ahead?  And why is he planning to charge the media for access to his election night party?  See below.

Obama campaign selling Chicago election night coverage packages to news outlets (by Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times, thanks to LisaB at No Quarter)
WASHINGTON—The Obama campaign is putting a hefty price tag on the best camera and reporting positions for news organizations covering Barack Obama’s outdoor election night activities in downtown Chicago. If a reporter wants access to the file center–which will be the best place to find Obama officials and spokesmen–be prepared to write a check for $935. The cheapest place a reporter could stand on a riser with a view is $880. That $935 covers one reporter in a heated file tent, power, cable tv, internet and food. I am told by an Obama spokesman who did not want his name used that this just covers costs and they are not turning a profit on this. The planners could have built in more al a carte options for Grant Park coverage. This is an outrageous pay to play plan that caters to national elite outlets with deep pockets.

$600 Million, $150 Million in September alone (by NewHampster at No Quarter)
Why does nobody ask where the money goes? I know a ton of money goes to staff, facilities and Bambi One. What I don’t know how to find but would like to know is what that $600,000,000 is really buying or can be perceived to be buying. This is where my great Internet sleuthing skills have hit a brick wall.
• I want to know how much Obama has spent with NBC as compared to McCain?
• I want to know how much Obama has spent with CNN, ABC, CBS as compared to McCain?
• Heck, I want to know how much Obama has spent with The New York Times and WAPO as compared to McCain?
• How much has Obama spent on Huffington and Politico as compared to McCain?
• How much has Obama paid for the love he gets from the media?
• I wouldn’t ask how much has Obama given out in bribes to each network as that would be a racist thought.

Big Donors Driving Obama’s Money Edge (Washington Post)
Lost in the attention given to Obama’s Internet surge is that only a quarter of the $600 million he has raised has come from donors who made contributions of $200 or less, according to a review of his FEC reports. That is actually slightly less, as a percentage, than President Bush raised in small donations during his 2004 race, although Obama has pulled from a far larger number of donors. In 2004, the Bush campaign claimed more than 2 million donors, while the Obama campaign claims to have collected its total from more than 3.1 million individuals.

Wednesday: Joe the Plumber- To the Barricades! (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
RD the Chemist here.  This is not the first time in history that the average Joe has been told to give up and accept his fate.  It’s not the first time that the people have resisted either… It was Tito the Construction Worker who put his finger on the problem: “Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. ‘I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys [members of the media] because I’m disgusted with you guys,’ he said. ‘Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong?… I am Joe the Plumber!” Munoz chimed in. “You’re attacking me.”

Let us review all of the lovely things the media has brought us in the past 15 years, shall we?
• Whitewater
• Paula Jones
• Travelgate
• Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
• Rose Law Firm Billing Records
• Ken Starr
• Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America
• Monica Lewinsky
• Impeachment of Bill Clinton
• 12 years of Movement Conservatives in Congress
• George Bush (2000)
• Code Orange after 9/11
• George Bush (2004)
• Iraq War II and over 4000 dead
• The intentional neglect of Valerie Plame’s outting by a sitting VP
• *NO* impeachment of George Bush
• The trashing of Hillary Clinton
• Coverup of the manipulation of the Democratic primaries and delegates
• Unchecked misogyny in the service of their chosen candidate…

It is time we took control of our lives back from the people whose goal is to manipulate our perceptions.  We must trust one another and resist the power of the media narrative.  When we put them back in their place, we’ll be back in charge of our own lives for the first time in 15 years. To the barricades!

CREEPING ANDREW SULLIVANISM: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
Then we have the astounding Josh Marshall… “I don’t think there’s any question that McCain’s is the dirtiest and most dishonest campaign, certainly in the last 35 years and possibly going much further back into the early 20th century.”… Is the current campaign “the most dishonest” of the past 35 years? For a liberal or a Democrat, it’s insane to address that question without discussing the twenty-month War Against Gore—and yes, Josh understands that fact (link below). But Josh is making himself a career—and he’s willing to disinform you to do it. Within the Village, you become a Very Serious Person by disappearing what the Villagers did for twenty straight months during Campaign 2000… The biggest mistake we’ve made in ten years was letting Josh slide in 2002, when he began to lie in your faces about the shape of that campaign… [H]e is emerging as the Sully of the pseudo-left. It’s long past time for this weird, creepy man to pack his satchel and go.

Sullied (by Anglachel)
The Incomparable Bob Somerby [see above] … talks about the broken soul of emerging “progressive” culture, insults from transparent strivers, the frantic desire to become a Very Serious Person, the pseudo-left… His focus is on the blogosphere and the straightforward lies of people like Marshall, Yglesias, Markos, Kevin Drum, Hamsher, Huffington, Atrios, Steve Benen, and Digby, the people who started exactly in the same place as Somerby (well, not Arianna) and who all of them, every last lying scumbag one, found out that the way to get invited onto TV, interviewed in big name news papers, sucked up to by political campaigns, was to join in the defamation of the Clinton/Gore administration.

It is more important to this group of the wanna-be punditocracy to be seen beating up that administration than to be critical of any Republican one. As we have seen over the last year, it is also more important to the Unity Democrats to defame these people than to actually unify the party into an electoral super-majority… To me, as I have been writing for months, the key lies with the psychosis of the Stevensonian crowd, who hate all things white and southern and who have seized the presence of racism (real and imagined) as the source of evil in the body politic. No lie is too much, no threat of violence too far, no manipulation of the process too crude in the Battle Against the Bubbas.

This is why we have the weird opposition to McCain and Palin, almost identical to the trashing of Hillary, focusing on racism and social status to the exclusion of substance. It can work if you have already decided that the poor and working class as such are not worthy of political representation. Exactly in the way that the Republicans have tried to make urban black populations stand in for everyone below upper middle class, trying to sully programs for lower classes by forcing programs benefitting those classes into grotesque blackface, now the Democrats are coming at this group from the other side, whitewashing their own class bigotry with the specter of the KKK.

Josh Marshall (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)

[A] link [in Somerby’s post] goes to this Marshall quote: “…I think deep down most reporters just have contempt for Al Gore. I don’t even think it’s dislike. It’s more like a disdain and contempt…And this was, you know, a year-and-a-half before the election, I think you could say this. This wasn’t something that happened because he ran a bad campaign. If he did, it was something that predated it.” Marshall here implies, but does not actually admit, his membership in that pack of Gore-haters. Hmmm. Contempt for Al Gore in the 2000 election. How well did that attitude work out for the country? Now Marshall — like others within the reportorial elite that once held Al Gore in such contempt — makes no secret for his love of all things Obama, and his hatred of all things Clinton.

History made the Gore-haters look foolish. History will have an even harsher judgment of the journalists and bloggers who demonized Hillary and gave us the cult of the Lightbringer.

You may not like Obama’s tax plan, but it’s not socialism (McClatchy)
ST. CHARLES, Mo. — “Make no mistake,” Republican activist John Hancock told a John McCain rally in this St. Louis suburb, “this campaign is a referendum on socialism.” Republicans have been pounding that theme in recent days, even though Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama doesn’t fit the definition of a socialist… Favoring higher tax rates for the wealthy than for the less fortunate isn’t socialism, and if it is, then the U.S. has been a socialist country for nearly a century, under both Democrats and Republicans… Socialism involves state ownership of the means of economic production and state-directed sharing of the wealth.
Now THAT’s reporting.

Big Labor Robocall: ‘John McCain Has Gotten Us Into This Economic Crisis’ (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
The AFL-CIO’s “Working America” is running a robocall attacking Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in battleground states Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Talking Points Memo reports. “‘…John McCain has gotten us into this economic crisis.  He supported sending our jobs overseas, and he supported getting rid of the rules for the fat cats on Wall Street.  In the meantime, he has done nothing to help struggling families on Main Street.  Now he wants to continue the same failed policies.’” John McCain has gotten us into this economic crisis? That’s so spurious I don’t even know where to start.
And that, too, is real reporting.

Palin to CNN: One part of USA not more patriotic than another (On Politics, USA Today)
CNN has released a transcript of Drew Griffin’s interview with Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Asked about her recent comments about patriotic values in “the real America” and the “pro-America areas of this great nation,” she explained why she made them and apologized: “I do not want that misunderstood. When I go to these rallies, and we see the patriotism just shining through, these people’s faces and the Vietnam veterans wearing their hats so proudly, and they have tears in their eyes as we sing our national anthem and — it is so inspiring. And I say that this is true America. You get it, you understand how important it is that in the next four years we have a leader who will fight for you. I certainly don’t want that interpreted as one area being more patriotic or more American than another. If that’s the way it has come across, I apologize.”

RNC Launches Small Database of Small Donors (Capital Eye)
Looking for more ways to prove their party’s transparency and question Sen. Barack Obama’s commitment to full disclosure, the Republican National Committee launched a new website today with a searchable database of unitemized RNC donors from the time Sen. John McCain became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Unitemized donors-those individuals giving $200 or less-usually remain nameless, because federal fundraising laws do not require candidates to identify these contributors in their reports to the Federal Election Commission. Last June, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, along with seven other watchdog groups, requested that the McCain and Obama campaigns release more information about these small donors. The McCain campaign made some improvements to a database on its website, but the Obama campaign never responded to the request. 

More Than a Two-Person Race (FAIR)
While the major-party race for the White House has been the subject of broad media attention for more than a year, the corporate media have mostly ignored at least four substantial third-party and independent candidates for the presidency. Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney and Libertarian candidate Bob Barr are both former congressmembers from the state of Georgia. Their presence in the White House race, along with independent candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, would seem to present an interesting counterpoint to the major-party race between Barack Obama and John McCain. While the corporate press has apparently decided that the differences between Obama and McCain are more or less the only political opinions worth exploring this election season, the third-party and independent candidates take positions on issues like drug war policy, Israel-Palestine, civil liberties and military intervention that differ markedly from the views of either major-party candidate.Obama to Appear on SNL on Weekend Before Election? (MollyGood)
In the wake of an awkward and unnecessary Sarah Palin appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend, news comes that Lorne Michaels, who recently donated $4,600 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, may have coaxed the Illinois senator into appearing on SNL the Saturday before the election.

Bachmann: It’s All Chris Matthews’ Fault! ‘He Laid A Trap, And I Walked Into It’ (Think Progress)
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is still on the defensive from an appearance last Friday on MSNBC’s Hardball, in which she called for the media to conduct a “penetrating exposé” into anti-American views of members of Congress. Speaking with the St. Cloud Times on Tuesday, Bachmann said she regretted suggesting that Barack Obama held “anti-American” views. Referencing Chris Matthews by name 12 times in a 6 minute interview, Bachmann portrayed herself as the victim of a clever ploy devised by the MSNBC host… Bachmann concluded the interview by circling back to where she began: “I didn’t bring the word choice up. That was Chris Matthews who brought the word choice up. Unfortunately, like I said, I walked into a trap.”
Click through to watch the video.

Time’s Joe Klein Banned From McCain’s Plane (Politico)
Time columnist Joe Klein, who’s been a forceful critic of the McCain campaign, has found himself without a seat on the McCain or Palin planes the past four months. In June, Klein was kept from boarding the McCain plane over what they said had been a security issue. More recently, when trying to fly on the Palin plane last week, the campaign’s response was he “couldn’t be accommodated at this time.”

Is Peggy Noonan the Best Columnist in America? (by Tunku Varadarajan, Forbes)
It says much for Rupert Murdoch’s instincts as a newspaperman that, soon after he started to run the Journal, Peggy Noonan’s column was plucked from the backwaters of the Weekend section and enthroned on the paper’s op-ed page. It is now the best op-ed column in America. Peggy is writing the prose of her life.
Has she stopped talking about magic dolphins?

Writer Lied Intentionally, Times Says (Gawker)
The New York Times ran a special editors’ note … accusing one of its freelancers of twisting the truth “to fit his theme, contrary to the Times’ standards of integrity.” The writer, Paul Burnham Finney, apparently distorted an American Psychological Association survey to reflect his article’s thesis that business travel and the Wall Street meltdown are stressing people out.

ACTION: Tell NBC to Replace Russert With a Woman (by Alegre)
NBC announced recently that they would name Tim Russert’s replacement as moderator of Meet the Press some time between next month’s elections and early December.  Ya know who’s in the running?  Chuck Todd and David Gregory.  Why rock the boat when you can keep the moderator’s chair in the boys club by naming another white guy eh? Well there’s a new group in town and its sole focus is to lobby NBC to replace Russert with a woman and/or a person of color (DontLetNBCDisWomen.org).  In case you haven’t noticed, all five of the Sunday morning talk shows are moderated by white males (Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, George Stephanopoulos, Wolf Blitzer, and Chris Wallace).  Not a woman or person of color in the club.  Well this new effort aims to shake things up a bit.

I checked out the website and found this interesting factoid… “In 1947, journalist Martha Roundtree created ‘Meet the Press’ and served as the first moderator. She has been the only female moderator in the 60 year history of the program.”
Click through for information on taking action.

Finally, a bus I’m not under (by vastleft at Corrente )
The Atheist Bus.

Eugene Jarecki on “The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril” (Democracy Now)
Election Day is two weeks away, and this year may see one of the highest voter turnouts in US history. But filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki argues that while voting is essential, it is not enough. He writes, “Unless we see our vote as part of a commitment to involve ourselves consistently and unrelentingly in the political process, our vote is wasted. This is because the forces that have led us to this economic, military, and political precipice exert such awesome power over the mechanics of Washington that no single candidate or group of legislators, whatever their intentions, can possibly go up against them unless armed with an irrepressible public mandate.”

If They’re Too Big To Fail, They’re Too Big Period (by Robert Reich)
According to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the biggest Wall Street banks now getting money from the government are just “too big to fail.” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke uses a different euphemism – he calls them “systemically critical.” The point is that if any of them goes down, it could take the whole financial system with it. So we taxpayers have to keep them up. We’re hearing the same argument elsewhere in Washington for saving General Motors. It’s just “too big to fail.” So Congress is considering a bailout that would keep GM afloat and sweeten a merger between GM and Chrysler.

Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe – just maybe – it’s too big, period. We used to have public policies to prevent companies from getting too big. Does anyone remember antitrust laws? Somewhere along the line policymakers decided that antitrust would only be used where there was evidence a company had so much market power it could keep prices higher than otherwise.

Wal-mart: Scenes from the Economic Front Lines (by Paul Kedrosky, thanks to Economist’s View)
Wal-mart is like the Bureau of Economic Analyst of retail: It has all the data you wish you had about what’s going on in the economy, plus more — and it has it all in realtime. With that in mind, here are some alternately choice and concerning nuggets from a speech today by the company’s president in Los Angeles:
• Credit is declining as a form of payment at Wal-mart. It will be down double-digits this year, he said.
• Spending spikes around pay periods have become much more pronounced, implying that many Wal-mart shoppers are living check-to-check.
• For the first time the company is seeing a paycheck-related spike in purchases of baby formula, suggesting some real teetering out there.

In Sour Economy, Some Scale Back on Medications (New York Times)
As people respond to hard times by juggling the cost of necessities, drugs sometimes have to wait.

Homeless numbers ‘alarming’ (USA Today)
More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation. Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.

Executive compensation rules in Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson trillion dollar bailout completely toothless (by lambert at Corrente)
Bloomberg: “[Goldman Sachs executives Blankfein, Cohn, Winkelried and Viniar] are among the executives whose compensation will be subject to new Treasury-imposed standards, although none of these rules is likely to make a material difference to pay practices at Goldman. While the company won’t be able to take tax deductions on salaries exceeding $500,000, bonuses that make up the majority of Goldman executives’ pay won’t be affected.”… It’s really just theft, isn’t it? Open, outright, shameless theft. Right out there in broad daylight.

Bailout Sleuth

Merrill Lynch executive to get $10 million golden parachute as company slashes 500 jobs. (Think Progress)
Merrill Lynch executive vice president Peter Kraus “is likely to leave with more than $10 million in compensation” after the company was bought by Bank of America last month. “He isn’t affected by a provision in the government’s rescue plan that curbs executive compensation, a person familiar with the situation said,” the Wall Street Journal noted. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Merrill Lynch “plans to cut about 500 jobs in its trading division as Chief Executive Officer John Thain shrinks the workforce to gird for a recession.”

Fed would grant up to $540B to money market funds (AP)
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday that it will provide up to $540 billion in financing to bolster the money market mutual fund industry, its latest effort to get credit flowing more freely again. The Fed’s new program, called the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, will be used to support a private-sector initiative designed to provide liquidity, or cash, to money market investors. The Fed plans to back purchases of short-term debt including certificates of deposit and commercial paper that expire in three months or less from money market mutual funds. The funds are large buyers of commercial paper and CDs, which historically are considered safe investments. However, the credit crisis, which took a turn for the worse last month, has put money market mutual funds under pressure as skittish investors demand withdrawals.

Estimates for credit swaps as high as $62 trillion (Seattle Times, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
NEW YORK — One festering problem that led to the financial meltdown hasn’t been addressed yet: credit-default swaps. The swaps — which were intended either as insurance on debt or side bets, depending on the buyer — are completely unregulated, prone to sloppy documentation and traded without a central clearinghouse. Sound bad? Here’s worse: No one knows how big the market is. Estimates range as high as $62 trillion.

Fearing a Drought of Aid (Washington Post)
President Bush, who has made international aid a cornerstone of his foreign policy, warned yesterday against cutting U.S. assistance to impoverished nations in the midst of the financial turmoil sweeping Wall Street and Main Street, arguing that doing so would undermine America’s economy, national security and moral authority.

Official Portraits Draw Skeptical Gaze (Washington Post )
Cost to Taxpayers Varies but Can Reach Nearly $50,000  

Protester attempts citizen’s arrest of Karl Rove in San Francisco. (Think Progress)
During an event in San Francisco Tuesday morning, a protester tried to “smack handcuffs on Karl Rove, but Rove slapped back, and the woman was taken off stage.”… When Rove complained of negative campaign tactics by Democrats, his co-panelist — former Sen. Majority Leader George Mitchell — quipped, “I have to say, I feel like Dorothy in the Land of Oz hearing you lecture about negative campaigns by others.”
Click through to watch the video.

San Francisco weighs decriminalizing prostitution  (AP)
n this live-and-let-live town, where medical marijuana clubs do business next to grocery stores and an annual fair celebrates sadomasochism, prostitutes could soon walk the streets without fear of arrest. San Francisco would become the first major U.S. city to decriminalize prostitution if voters next month approve Proposition K—a measure that forbids local authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting anyone for selling sex.

Media Matters for America headlines

• Quinn and Tennent: Powell endorsed Obama because “he’s tired of being called an Oreo,” “an Uncle Tom”

• Buchanan overstates Democratic support for Alito and Roberts on Supreme Court confirmation votes

• Politico repeated Cindy McCain’s comment about troop-funding vote without noting her husband’s own vote

• Quinn falsely claimed most average-income bus drivers, teachers, and autoworkers “don’t pay any taxes”

• LA Times, Chicago Tribune uncritically reported McCain’s misrepresentation of Obama’s tax plan

• NBC reported on FBI’s ACORN investigation, but not on DOJ regulations prohibiting leaks

• Hume furthered capital gains tax assertion disputed by economists

• MSNBC, CNN anchors baselessly suggested Obama is prematurely “measuring the drapes” for the White House

• Wash. Post reported that McCain campaign manager warned of “rampant voter fraud,” but not that illegal votes are almost never cast

• USA Today cited “accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression” but omitted examples of voter suppression

• Wash. Post uncritically reported McCain’s attack on Obama for “wanting to raise taxes” on Americans like Joe the Plumber

• Selectively citing Gallup poll’s findings, Morning Joe joined Drudge Report in touting “Gallup shock”

• KSFO’s Rodgers said many “professed leaders of the feminist movement” are “hags” who “couldn’t get laid in a men’s prison”

Post-Partisan Reflection: Has the Election Changed the Way We Receive News?
The saga of Hillary, Obama, Palin, and McCain has been a boon to news and political Web sites, which have seen audience numbers balloon as the 2008 presidential election has unfolded. What happens after America’s favorite obsession is satisfied on Nov. 4? While a drop-off is expected, many publishers say this period of intense interest has likely converted many to online-news junkie status for good.

Accused Guns ’N Roses leaker pleads guilty
A blogger accused of leaking songs from the long-delayed Guns N’ Roses album “Chinese Democracy” has pleaded not guilty to violating federal copyright laws.

Death Of Old Media Exaggerated, They Have At Least Five Years Left (Paid Content)
Not the ringingest of endorsements from PriceWaterhouseCoopers: traditional media are not dead yet… because their consumers are not dead yet. Analyst Marcel Fenez (via Press Gazette): “One of the things we need to get into context here is that traditional media isn’t dead yet and won’t be for the next five years. It’s very important to think why. The over-50s are helping to sustain traditional media, and also in many of the emerging markets there is still plenty of room for traditional media. The death of traditional media is exaggerated, at least in a five-year context.” So media forecasting becomes mortality prediction. On that basis, assuming advances in healthcare continue to extend human lifespans, “traditional” media may even be around for more than five years. Although digital ad spend will grow 11 times faster than print up to 2012, it will still only be 10 percent that in newspapers, Fenez said. 

MediaNews CEO Singleton: Consolidating Newsrooms, Outsourcing Could Equal Survival (Paid Content)
MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Monday that his company is exploring outsourcing almost across the board, including the possibility of a single news desk for the company that could be offshore. But, according to the AP, he said no decisions have been made yet about moving editorial functions overseas although most of the pre-production for the California papers is done in India. That move cut costs by 65 percent. He said local editors would maintain control and no page would go to press sans local approval. Singleton, who is also chairman of the AP board, also “talked about outsourcing delivery of newspapers, relying more intensely on syndicates for non-local news, and moving circulation call centers offshore.”
InsightAnalytical on MediaNews Group: “According to their site, … ‘Our corporate mission is to be the leading provider of local news, information and services in our strategically located markets by continually expanding and leveraging our news gathering resources.’  ‘Leveraging,’ at least here in southern NM, seems to mean cookie-cutter content with a smattering of local stories and press releases about clubs and entertainment listings.”

AP Insurrection Grows
What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against the AP suddenly grew much more serious last week, when the Tribune Company, one of the largest newspaper chains, said on Thursday that it would drop out of the association, followed by The Columbus Dispatch’s announcement of the same. A handful of papers have made the same move over the last few months, but with the exception of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, they were relatively small.

WSJ Circ Flat, But That’s Fine
Next Monday, The Wall Street Journal, now under Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., will report that its daily circulation based on a Monday through Friday average for the six months ending September 2008 will be flat. However, that is a lot to be positive about when the industry’s overall numbers are broken out.

Controversial Magazine-Sharing Site Mygazines Folds
Just weeks after settling a lawsuit with dozens of publishers, Mygazines, the controversial Web site that allowed users to share digital copies of hundreds of magazines, has closed. According to a note posted on the Mygazines homepage, “monetary reasons” and “the state of the global economy” caused the site’s collapse. “We simply ran out of funds to support the daily operations.”

Radio Gaining Audience — But Not Ad Revenue
Radio is gaining audience, according to a new study, but more listeners are not doing much to boost radio’s fortunes. Industry revenue has been largely flat to down in the past five years due to the gradual migration of listeners to MP3 players and online radio — not to mention advertisers’ simultaneous migration to other niche media such as cable TV, web portals and, to a smaller extent, satellite radio.

Universal Studios Discusses Sale of a Film Unit
Universal Studios is in advanced talks to sell one of its two specialty film labels to Relativity Media, a private production and financing company.

Rather wouldn’t be surprised to see a network dump the evening news
“I’m not predicting it, but I would not be surprised to see one or more of the major over-the-airways networks do away with evening news as we know it,” says Dan Rather. “Having said that I believe someone, at least some one, will stay in that business.”

Crisis Makes Suze Orman a Star
The financial crisis is sinking stocks around the globe, but it’s raising Suze Orman’s stock on Madison Avenue. And her sudden stardom is raising some eyebrows. At a time when the public is frightened, and hungry for help with personal finances, Orman is the best-known personal-finance adviser out there.

‘Sunday Night Football’ Ratings Decline for Fourth Week
Rash Report: Maybe NBC Should Consider Putting Sarah Palin in the Booth

Tom Group, NBA Partner On Chinese Web Sites; Free Live Games Online Daily During Regular Season (Paid Content)
The NBA’s digital reach in China is getting a Yao Ming-sized boost from a new deal with Tom Group. The multi-year pact between NBA China and Tom Group means expanded content for NBA.com/China, NBA.com/Taiwan and NBA.com/Hongkong. The China and HongKong siteswill show a live NBA game every day of the regular season—free, with play-by-play in Chinese. Other aspects include live halftime highlights in real time; social network features; personalization; and—a first for Asia—a live daily half-hour highlight show produced by Tom for all three sites and as a prime-time show on CETV. Tom claims 100 million users, 200 million wireless users and 70 million TOM-Skype users

Telemundo, Televisa Ink Digital Distribution Deal in Mexico; Univision Still Outside Looking In (Paid Content)
Televisa can now distribute original programs from NBCU’s Telemundo across all of its digital and wireless platforms in Mexico: the heavily-trafficked esmas.com.mx entertainment portal, streaming video and VOD Websites, as well as its Esmas Movil mobile content platform, Variety reports. The deal fleshes out a strategic partnership the two companies announced in March, which let Televisa port Telemundo’s shows to its on-air channel Canal 9. But it also leaves estranged Televisa partner Univision on the outside looking in yet again, as the NY-based Spanish media giant lost the broadcasting rights to (and the resulting ad revenue from) a series of Mexico’s premiere soccer games in September. Televisa gave Telemundo the rights when the contract expired. The bad blood between the two companies will likely come to a head in January, when their long-standing legal battle over royalties and a 25-year-long contract that Televisa wants out of actually goes to court. 

Oprah Goes Bilingual
Chicago-based Harpo Productions says The Oprah Winfrey Show is being made available in Spanish through Secondary Audio Programming and closed captioning. The Spanish-language offerings launched Monday in the country’s six largest Hispanic TV markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, and Dallas. More cities are expected to be added this season.

BBC Unveils Regional Shakeup
The BBC has announced a radical blueprint that involves shifting the production of many of its flagship shows outside London. The plan, which has led to uproar in certain sections of the U.K. media but is supported by independent producers’ lobby group Pact, is part of the pubcaster’s strategy to make half of network TV shows beyond London by 2016.

Telemundo to Cut 5% of Jobs
NBC Universal’s Spanish-language television division, Telemundo, is whittling its workforce by 5%, cutting at least 85 jobs amid a slowdown in advertising. “The broadcast business is being challenged,” Telemundo President Don Browne said Thursday. “We are proactively and strategically making some adjustments to protect the larger company so that we can weather this period.”

Disney Emerges a Winner (by Jon Fine, BusinessWeek)
While this slow media environment is likely mere rehearsal for what looms, Disney appears to be a good bet for stability. Ultimately, its trump cards are pretty prosaic: The company is less dependent on advertising, and it sold off a newspaper division in 1997. In times like these, strategic brilliance doesn’t drive stock prices. Avoiding anything radioactive does.

Watercooler Teams Up With Hulu to Broadcast Top TV Shows on TVLoop (Mashable)
Known for bringing us the “Addicted to the [TV Show Name]” applications on sites like Facebook, Watercooler is branching out in its partnership with Hulu to bring us our favorite television shows via TVLoop. This partnership will enable you to view 40 top shows with Hulu’s standard full-screen, high quality viewing experience. It also uses the social aspects of TVLoop to connect users who watch the same shows. Social television – what could be better? Many episodes of shows like ER and One Tree Hill will have full length versions available. Some will only be available in clip format, like Friends and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

CBS Interactive Hopes To Gather TV Viewers And Web Users In ‘Social Viewing Rooms’ (Paid Content)
While the data on how many viewers are watching TV and surfing the web simultaneously has been a little thin the past few years, CBS Interactive feels it has little to lose with a new service that aims to capture those viewers doing both. Its new Social Viewing Room service will encourage users to watch shows on TV, find like-minded fans and participate in chats around a particular program… If the Social Viewing Room attracts enough participants, CBS expects to expand the model to such other CBS Corp. divisions, such as the CW and Showtime. 

Fox Creates Mobile Group After Buying Jamba Stake; Will Launch U.S. Brand (Paid Content)
News Corp is overhauling its mobile operations after paying VeriSign $200 million for its remaining 49 percent state in Jamba, the mobile content company. This marks the end to the company’s whirlwind history, which succeeded with the rise of ringtones, only to struggle as it faced controversies over billing practices and waning ringtone sales. Going forward, the company known as Jamba will be gone, but the brand will continue under the newly formed Fox Mobile Group, which will be led by Jamba’s CEO Mauro Montanaro. Under the new leadership and business structure, the group will enter its next phase, which includes significant investments by launching a new mobile brand in the U.S. and by opening up a new studio to create made-for-mobile content.

Facebook Pushes Into the Music Biz
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is plotting a possible push into the digital-music business in the wake of MySpace’s launch of MySpace Music last month. The surging social-networking giant is talking to a number of song-streaming services and music community sites, including Rhapsody.com, iMeem.com, iLike.com, and Lala.com, about an outsourcing deal that would more deeply integrate their music experience into Facebook.

Glam Media Finds Its Male Side, Launches Brash.com (Paid Content)
After offering a hint about its plans last month, female-centric Glam Media has released Brash, its new male-focused lifestyle and entertainment online hub. Brash is being targeted to men 18-49 years old and is beginning life with more than 25 sites including ArtistDirect, DigitalTrends.com, Squidoo and SpirlFrog. Samir Arora, Glam’s CEO, claims that the Brash network has more then 10 million uniques at launch. The network is comprised of five channels:  Men’s Lifestyle (Style, Fitness, Travel, Food & Drink), Entertainment (Music, Movies, TV, Games), Tech (Audio, Gadgets, PC & Macs), Auto (Luxury, Sport, SUV, and Sedans) and News (World, US, Politics & Tech).  In addition to the site network, Glam has also created BrashTV, a DRM-protected, video distribution platform built on GlamTV.

New Online Magazine Edited by R.U. Sirius Debuts
Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) — in collaboration with former Mondo 2000 editor RU Sirius — is pleased to present h+. A web-based quarterly magazine, h+covers the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging and overcoming human limitations.

MySpace Misses in China
Rupert Murdoch hasn’t enjoyed much success in China. That’s why expectations were so high for the launch of MySpace in China. Unlike the movie and TV industries, the Chinese Internet business is open to foreign investment. But Murdoch’s bad China luck isn’t changing, though: MySpace China doesn’t have much to show for its effort.

Yahoo Changing Its Homepage Gradually
A few weeks ago, Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But the job of revamping the Web’s most visited portal page is fraught with risk. If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising. So Yahoo is introducing changes in small stages and to small segments of its audience.

Craigslist’s Red Light District Gets Mapped (by Paul Glazowski at Mashable)
We don’t frequently pay mind to the world of adult-natured business on the Web. Only on occasion will we see what’s going on in “that part” of the networked world. For instance, sites like Zivity and AdultStumble have crossed our desk for brief moments in the past, and we’ve said as much. You know where this is going. We were made privy today to a little mashup called hookupmaps. In short, it’s Craigslist (the 18-and-over part) meets Google Maps. And while the place may not behoove us to immediately toss out the NSFW item, the flag will need to fly soon enough. Once you begin browsing around, really. If you being browsing.

Lala.com gives digital music another try
LOS ANGELES (AP) – First a CD-trading site, then a free Web-based music browser, lala.com is being born again. The site is relaunching Tuesday as a hybrid, offering the digital download functionality of iTunes and the free music streaming of MySpace Music without the ads. 

A Modest Proposal: Make Money From Your Content
Hyper-distribution has become for some such an article of faith in the digital ecosystem that it sometimes seems impolite to ask the big monetization question. How do we make money from being so free and loose with our content? Ads sold by the original publisher are themselves embedded in the media wherever they go (Hulu, etc.). But in most cases, the monetization of hyper-distributed content is more an article of faith than reality.

AP’s Mobile News Network Comes To BlackBerry (Mashable)
Associated Press has launched its Mobile News Network, a multimedia news portal designed for use on mobile devices back in May. Now, they’ve launched a client application optimized for BlackBerry smart phones, available for download over at bb.apnews.com… Mobile News Network application works on BlackBerry Curve, Pearl, and even the new Bold and Flip. It’s no wonder that BlackBerry, the favorite device of your typical business user, was the first device after the iPhone to receive a customized application version of the mobile news portal. iPhone users can find their MNN app in the App Store, while everyone else interested should simply point their mobile web browser to www.apnews.com.

All the Celebrities You Want, on Your Cellphone
The cellphone has become the latest medium to feed the appetite for up-to-the-second celebrity gossip.

CBS Tries Out a New Recipe for Unilever
As television viewers increasingly zap through ads and watch shows online, media companies have been scrambling to come up with more creative ways for companies to advertise on network TV. CBS’s latest answer is an ad partnership with Unilever’s Bertolli Italian-food brand that seeks to blend advertising and entertainment in a new campaign.

Google Begins UK Gambling Ads After Self-Imposed Four-Year Ban (Paid Content)
After posting better-than-expected Q3 results, Google could be in line for a revenue jackpot after allowing gambling adverts in the UK from today in its search results for the first time since a self-imposed ban in 2004. Google’s industry leader for entertainment and media James Cashmore told FT.com he hoped that change would “enhance the search experience for users and help advertisers connect with interested consumers” Of course, It will also make a shed-load of money—as much as £100 million extra in ad revenue by the FT’s estimate.

S&P Bearish on Print Ads
Add Standard & Poor’s to the growing list of industry watchers down on print advertising, at least for now. S&P expects magazine ad pages to decline through the end of 2008, with “minimal benefit from election-year activity,” it said, adding, “The sector will face continued ad rate challenges, especially given pressure on circulation levels that publishers guarantee to advertisers.”

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Matt Davies

MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh Predicts Spaceships Will Appear Oct. 31st in Support of Senator Obama
Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, Master UFO Caller says that on October 31, 2008, superhuman black men, from other planets, will appear in their spaceships and hover over his UFO Summoning School for three days as a sign that all Americans should vote for Obama as President.

Obama to travel to see ill grandmother
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Barack Obama will leave the campaign trail Thursday to travel to Hawaii to see his 85-year-old grandmother, who has fallen ill, spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday. “In the last few weeks her health has deteriorated to the point where her situation is very serious,” Gibbs told reporters aboard Obama’s campaign plane… His grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, “has always been one of the most important people in his life,” Gibbs said. “Along with his mother and his grandfather, she raised him in Hawaii from the time he was born to the moment he left for college.”
While he’s in Hawaii, he should pick up a vault copy of his birth certificate and provide it to the judge to settle Phil Berg’s lawsuit.  If he doesn’t do that, he should resign from the race.  We Americans have a right to know for certain whether he’s qualified to be president.

And this means we’re supposed to vote FOR the guy?
Biden to Supporters: “Gird Your Loins”, For the Next President “It’s Like Cleaning Augean Stables” (Political Radar, ABC News)
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions. “Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy… [W]e’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.” [Emphasis added.]
Masslib at Alegre’s Corner believes that this command is the equivalent of saying, “DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. Oh, and ask your neighbors to do the same.”  And gqmartine at Corrente says “It seems like Biden is hinting at their possible governing strategy: Even if you think we’re wrong, we need you to use your influence to convince people we are right. ” Don’t you love the new authoritarians? So much better than the OLD authoritarians.

McCain to Hit Obama on Biden’s Prediction Obama Will be Tested by International Crisis (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected president, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in office, a comment Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., intends to highlight Monday, aides said, in order to highlight concerns some voters have had about Obama’s preparedness to be commander-in-chief.
McCain would be a fool not to use it.  Of course, it will be considered “negative”, “hateful”, and “racist” by the Obama-loving media.

Barack Obama vows to ‘change the world’ (The Telegraph, U.K.)
The supremely confident demeanour and exalted rhetoric of the Democratic nominee at a New Hampshire event betrayed that he is a man convinced he is poised to make history… Speaking in an apple orchard against the picture-perfect New England backdrop of an red, green and yellow autumn foliage on a stage adorned with pumpkins and hay bales, Mr Obama reminded voters of the dangers of hubris… But much of Mr Obama’s speech in Londonderry – punctuated by cries of “We all love you Obama”, “I love you” and “We will work with you” – was devoted to the kind of quasi-religious sentiments and motivational-coach style exhortations, the kind of pride that set him up for a big fall in January…

A lone McCain supporter at the rally said she too was convinced that the Republican nominee was finished. “McCain has lost,” said Deborah Barnhart, 48, who runs a landscaping business. “He’s lost because the Messiah has spoken and we’re going to change the world. That’s all people want to hear after eight years of Bush. Obama thinks he’s won. Everyone here thinks he’s won.”

horrifyingly uninformed voters… (by American Girl in Italy at No Quarter)
Should some people not vote? I’m thinking…yes.
Click through to watch the video.

The OTHER Michelle tape (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
As you probably know, API — African Press International, based in Norway — published an interview with Michelle Obama in which she said some rather bizarre things. The media consensus holds that the interview is bogus. Perhaps so. API, however, stands by the story and says that they will soon release audio tapes which prove that Michelle really did say the words ascribed to her… The odd statements ascribed to Michelle, if genuine, would not be game-changers. But proof that Obama boldly lied about the matter might affect the race.

Important Update: US Law firm enters into agreement to represent API in The Michelle Obama tapes to be released soon in the US (African Press International)
The touchy interview tapes of Michelle Obama, the wife of the US Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is soon ready for release in the US and will be aired unedited. The release has taken long due to the fact that API wanted to clear all legal hurdles and be safe from getting sued by any one. API and a US Law firm - LAW OFFICES OF PHILIP J. BERG has just entered into an agreement giving the law firm the right to represent API in all matters that may arise due to the Michelle Obama interview and the release of the tapes in the US.
Phil Berg is the lawyer who filed suit to force Obama to show a vault copy of his birth certificate to verify that he is a natural born U.S. citizen, which he must be to serve as president.

Complaint hits Rezko land deal (Washington Times)
A former Illinois bank official, now claiming whistleblower status, says bank officials replaced a loan reappraisal that he prepared for a Chicago property that was purchased by the wife of now-convicted felon Tony Rezko, part of which was later sold to next-door neighbor Barack Obama. In a complaint filed Thursday in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Kenneth J. Connor said that his reappraisal of Rita Rezko’s property was replaced with a higher one and that he was fired when he questioned the document…

Rezko was convicted this summer on federal charges of using his clout with state government to squeeze kickbacks out of firms wanting to do business with the state. The charges did not involve Mr. Obama. Rezko is now cooperating with federal prosecutors in a continuing probe of corruption in Illinois government. Mr. Obama consulted Rezko, a real estate developer, before buying his home in 2005. As a state senator, Mr. Obama wrote letters endorsing government support of a Rezko housing project for senior citizens. Obama aides say he was simply supporting a project that would help residents of his district, not doing a favor for a friend.
These housing developments were a great help to Obama’s constituents when Rezko went bust and had to have the heat turned off.  There are many more questions to be asked about the Obamas’ mansion purchase.

Advertisers say Obama is ‘marketer of the year’ (On Politics, USA Today)
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was voted “marketer of the year” last night at the opening dinner of the Association of National Advertisers annual conference, Advertising Age reports. The Obama “brand” came in ahead of Apple and Zappos.com in voting by the 750 folks attending ANA’s dinner in Orlando. Obama got 36% of the vote, to Apple’s 27% and Zappos’ 14%. Republican nominee John McCain came in 6th, with 5%. “I think (Obama) did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president,” Linda Clarizio, president of AOL’s Platform A, tells Ad Age. (Fair warning, there’s an obscenity in the Ad Age report.)
Democrats can be so proud.  So very proud.  To have a marketed candidate.  He doesn’t have to stand for a damned thing, see?

One word means both ‘hip’ and ‘hot’ in French. It’s ‘Obama’ (McClatchy)
PARIS — His visage appears between the svelte curves of fashion models on Europe’s most prestigious runways. His speeches are remixed into thumping music tracks in underground dance clubs. His campaign slogans are the foundation for modern art hanging on trendy Parisian gallery walls.
He’s the new new thing.  Ain’t it great?  Doesn’t have to have a damn bit of experience, but boy, he’s been MARKETED!  Happy, happy Democrats!  Who cares that he doesn’t stand for anything?  The HIP people LOVE him—ALL OVER THE WORLD!

Powell endorses Obama, chides McCain campaign tone (AP)
WASHINGTON – Colin Powell, a Republican who was President Bush’s first secretary of state, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president Sunday and criticized the tone of Republican John McCain’s campaign.
Powell’s aid to his superiors in covering up the 1968 My Lai massacre helped his career immensely.  And he is one of the people primarily responsible for pushing Bill Clinton’s presidency off track in its early days by refusing to help Clinton change the policy on gays in the military.  I can see why the anti-Clinton Democrats are so excited by this endorsement.  The same people who used to call Powell the most vile names because of his part in justifying the Iraq War, now love him because the loves the guy they love.

A Nation of Mythical Mavericks: Colin Powell Endorses Obama (by vastleft at Corrente)
Post-partisan hero Colin Powell has endorsed post-partisan hero Barack Obama, instead of post-partisan hero John McCain… Powell registered measured disgust at some of the GOP’s tactics… He disapproves of the McCain campaign’s fixation on tying Obama to William Ayers. “What they’re trying to connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that’s inappropriate.” If there’s one thing Colin Powell would never do, it’s fabricating connections to “some kind of terrorist feelings.”

No comment (by lambert at Corrente)
Colinoscopy: “‘He will have a role as one of my advisers,’ Barack Obama said on NBC’s ‘Today’ in an interview aired Monday, a day after Powell, a four-star general and President Bush’s former secretary of state, endorsed him. ‘Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether that’s a good fit for him, is something we’d have to discuss,’ Obama said.” Well, a question: Judy Miller for press secretary?
Oh, Lambert, you’re just so silly.  Judy will be too busy in her new role at Fox News to be Obama’s press secretary.

Pat Buchanan says Colin Powell endorsed Obama because he’s black (by John Amato at Crooks and Liars)
Liberals in general are no fans of Colin Powell, but watching the right wing ideologues slam Powell because of his endorsement of Obama, I can only assume that they fear this particular endorsement because it will have an impact on undecided and independent voters. Pat Buchanan follows the lead of Rush Limbaugh and George Will and says that his only motivation was the color of his skin. A Red State writer actually says this: “Affirmative Action At The Highest Level Unqualified Applicants Get Jobs Due Solely To Their Race”

Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times make history by endorsing Obama (On Politics, USA Today)
The Chicago Tribune is Democrat Barack Obama’s hometown paper, so you might think its endorsement of him for president today is a no-brainer. Not so much. The paper’s editorial board is conservative.
So, fauxgressives.  Are you as happy about this as you are about the Powell endorsement?

In Philly, Conservative Talk Radio Host Backs Obama (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
On his talk show on WPHT [Friday], conservative Philadelphian Michael Smerconish endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
And are you happy about this, fauxgressives?  How many right-wing endorsements of Obama will finally make you realize that he, himself, is a right winger?

Neocons for Obama? (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
George Packer from the New Yorker magazine reports on an email he got from Ken Adelman today indicating that the neo-con is planning on voting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill… Adelman infamously suggested US forces would experience a “cakewalk in Iraq.” So it’s not like his judgment is unassailable.
And does THIS make you happy, fauxgressives?  Everything you have said for years that you hate is embodied in the guy you pushed into the Democratic nomination.  Congratulations!  Lambert reports that Booman “burbles, hilariously, ‘It’s an excellent sign for Obama’s presidency that he has such a broad range of elite support.’”

Great Moments With The Party Of Ideas (by vastleft at Corrente)
Thank goodness partisanship is off the table. So glad we kept funding the war, legalized warrantless wiretapping, spit on the establishment clause, and kissed Paulson’s ass, so we could win over these fine folks!

Obama has kind words for Reagan… (Politico)
In an interview with a Florida station, Obama returns to a sense of a happy ideological medium and to (relatively) kind words for the original deregulator, Ronald Reagan: ”What happened was Democrats had gotten complacent, had gotten fat and happy. they thought there was a government program to solve every problem. Ronald Reagan came in and said we need to break out of the old ways of doing things and create a leaner, more effective government,” he said. “That was the right message then. I think that right now we went too far in the wrong direction. We can’t go back to the old liberalism of the past, but [when] you are on your own economic philosophy [of] Bush and McCain doesn’t work either. Let’s try a new way where we apply common sense, have government do what it does well.” Click here to watch the video.

Perception management (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Government grew under Ronald Reagan. RR apologists, such as Rush Limbaugh, have been trying to explain away that annoying fact for years. So why does Obama say that Regan shrank government? Because that is what everyone thinks. More accurately: That is what everyone has been told to think. The Republican propaganda machine has blared its “government-is-the-enemy” message for so long that people believe the advertising instead of the history… But what do facts matter? As I’ve been saying for years, the only question left is Pilate’s question. And the answer seems to be this: Truth is perception; truth is not what is.

And now, a slice of deep-dish paranoia: Who is Bill Ayers really? How did the son of a Chicago bigwig get up to such shennanigans, and why did wrathful William end up hobnobbing with the powerful instead of rotting in a cell? The antics of the Weathermen served only to alienate America from the left, thereby paving the way for the triumph of Reagan and the end of the New Deal consensus. Walter Annenberg was a friend to Ronald Reagan; how did the Annenberg Foundation end up funding a guy like Ayers? The allegations found here may be a bit too paranoid even for me, but you may want to read them nonetheless. Caveat lector and all that, but let us not be overly quick to dismiss.

Obama and Ayers WORKED in the SAME Office & Address For Three (3) Years (by SusanUnPC at No Quarter)
For three years, and as recently as 2000, Barack Obama and William Ayers WORKED in the same Chicago office — along with Mike Klonsky, another infamous member of the bomb-setting domestic terrorists of the Weather Underground. Great. Our next president may not just be the most liberal politician to ever serve but his only major achievement will be his years working in an office with a domestic terrorist and a radical Maoist on failed educational projects. Actually, what worries me as much as the anti-American, still-active extremists he’s hung around with for decades is that Obama is a failed executive and has never administered any venture that succeeded, except his own elections.

Biden scandal (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
I’m not sure how to handle this information. It comes to me from a source I trust. Seriously: I trust this source the way I would trust a close family member. Right now, I’m going to play it cryptic. According to the source, Joe Biden is having a secret affair with a rather well-known lady, whom I will call L. The lady has had several liaisons with the celebrated. The affair may soon be revealed by the major media — although I do not know if that revelation will happen before or after the election. I’m not sure how to pursue the matter, or even if I should.

The real meat in the Letterman interview (Hot off the Trail, McClatchy)
Letterman was pressing McCain about his efforts to tie Barack Obama to Bill Ayers, the Chicago professor who founded the Vietnam-era Weather Underground group whose protests included bombings of government buildings. Letterman pressed home the obvious point that Obama was 8 years old when Ayers was engaged in anti-war activities. Then Letterman noted that we all have associations in our lives that we can’t really control, and the viewers thought, Well, here’s where Letterman brings up the Keating 5. But Letterman had a better McCain association to recall: “‘Did you not have a relationship with Gordon Liddy?’ Letterman asked… ‘Did you attend a fundraiser at his house?’” If McCain could have gone any paler, he would have. He fell silent.
Maybe McCain fell silent because of the ridiculousness of the comparison.  McCain didn’t spend years working on the boards of two nonprofits with Gordon Liddy, passing out largesse to enhance his political career.  Obama did spend that kind of quality time with Bill Ayers.  This reminds me of the comparison between Obama spending 20 years listening to a hate-America pastor and Bill Clinton having the pastor at one White House event—with many other pastors.  The bottom line?  Obama can do no wrong.

I am THIS close to registering Republican (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
My god, what has Barack Obama done to the Democratic party? I used to say that all Obots are monsters. Perhaps the time has come to say that all DEMOCRATS are monsters. What other conclusion should I reach, when every day I wake up to see my comments filled with hate messages accusing me of being a racist and a fascist, simply because I will not vote for a Democratic candidate who stole the nomination? The Dems are now guilty of every sin they have ever ascribed to the Republicans. The Dems bleat about a mythical call to violence at a Palin rally, yet they themselves are guilty of both verbal and physical violence — as in this instance when Democrat fanatics assault a woman who won’t vote as they wish…

Photographs show that young men were also carrying McCain signs on that occasion. The brave, brave Obot went after the small, older woman.

I have been a lifelong liberal, as was my father before me. But I am repulsed by a political movement that encourages such behavior. And yes, I do blame Obama and Dean directly. Throughout this year, the Obots have indulged relentlessly in the language of violence. They repeatedly called Hillary Clinton a cunt and a bitch. Time and again, they have threatened violence against anyone who commits the sin of not voting in the Obot-approved fashion. It was inevitable that their violent language would one day transform into violent deeds. Not once have Obama or Dean condemned this disgusting behavior… Silence equals acquiescence; acquiescence equals encouragement.

Death threat, vandalism hit ACORN after accusations (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — The furor over ACORN’s national voter registration drive exploded with new controversies Friday, including a call by Barack Obama for an independent prosecutor, a Supreme Court ruling over voter access and the disclosure of a death threat against an ACORN worker.

Late Night: The Dog Barks at Midnight (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
I think it would be tres chic to have an African-American president.  I just think that the nominee who got this far by manipulating primary results, villifying women and cutting off the working class has Martin Luther King rolling in his grave.  We don’t know who is giving him the hundreds of millions of dollars to run his campaign and we sure as hell don’t trust him.  If we succeed in our endeavor of truncating his meteoric political career, we will not be famous.  We’ll be notorious.  It may be years before anyone recognizes the honor in what we do.  We are only trying to make sure that we all go forward together.  That we leave no one behind.  That lives, fortunes and sacred honor depend upon one another. So I urge you to Join The Resistance.  Let’s drown out the Haka.  It is big and noisy and intimidating.  But we have heart and a vision.

FL Girl Called ‘Racist’ for Wearing pro-Palin T-shirt (by NewHampster at No Quarter)
Read my lips people: S-T-O-P with the faux charges of racism; children are now getting on the faux outrage bandwagon. MyFox Orlando has the story: “She’s only 12 years old but Ashleigh Jones is feeling the heat of this election year. That’s because the seventh grader at New Smyrna Beach Middle School was called a racist by classmates for wearing a pro-Sarah Palin t-shirt…” Here is the t-shirt in question:

Real Palin on SNL (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
Palin clips from [Saturday Night Live] are linked here… Ya know what – SHE is GREAT. Almost a natural and a great sport as well. I like her. Don’t like that, Psycho Obama Pod faux liberals??? Screw you.

A KING’S HEIGHTENED DRAMA: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
“[Colbert] KING (10/18/08): ‘Kill him’: the battle cry of a lynch mob and words yelled out by a man at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Fla., this month, according to my Post colleague Dana Milbank.” With this rhetorical sleight of hand, an unfortunate shout by one single person slid into “the battle cry of a lynch mob.” Having granted himself that advantage, King soon rendered a judgment which was, on its face, just absurd: “…It represents a dangerous new low in American politics.” Surely, King can’t really believe that. He can’t believe that an unfortunate call by one nameless person “represents a dangerous new low in American politics.” King had massively heightened his drama in these first three paragraphs—but he wasn’t talking about baseball (where “kill the umpire” is a famous old cry).  He was talking about our most serious subject—and doing so quite irresponsibly. Quickly, more sleight of hand: “The ugliness is stunning.”…

[M]any people will see the unfairness of King’s loud cries—and their hearts will harden accordingly. They will harden in their sense that there is no harbor for them on “the left”—in their sense that there is no reason to listen to liberal or mainstream complaints about the conduct of McCain and Palin. Some of those people would have seen what is wrong in the conduct of McCain and Palin—if King had bothered to dirty his hands explaining the misconduct to them. But they will recoil at the sheer absurdity of this column’s rhetoric—even as pseudo-liberal hearts are warmed. This leaves us caught in that “culture war”—the war the other side wants. As a general matter, nothing is dumber than fighting on turf the other side has chosen. And that’s what pseudo-liberals do when they keep this “culture war” going—along with its familiar handmaiden, the journalism of perfect dumbness.
In my opinion, McCain has been singularly easy on Obama, as was Hillary.  But if Obama loses on November 4, we already know why.  It won’t be because he’s the least qualified candidate ever to be fielded by a major party, or due to his opportunistic relationships with some of the most radical elements in the U.S., and it won’t be because he ran the most vicious primary campaign run by a Democrat in my 64½ years on earth—thereby alienating half of the Democratic Party.  It will be because of racism.  How do I know?  The pundits told me so.

Partisans, Demons and Right-Wing Tropes (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
From Reagan’s rise through Bush’s fall the conservative movement repeatedly demonized liberals as unpatriotic, corrupt and stupid… But during these dark years the “progressive” Democrats began to demonize their opponents as well… I’m not here to justify Republicans or their ideology.  I’m here to criticize the mutual demonization and the partisanship trap… The situation we have now allows any connection, however tenuous, to the Republican party or a conservative thinker to permit the declaration that the argument is a “right-wing trope” and therefore illegitimate.  It also permits the demonization of total strangers, individually and in groups.  It isn’t much of a step from arguing your opponent is a racist to arguing your opponent’s argument should be prohibited, and then a little further to using extra-legal means to stop him…

The demonization of political opponents also allows Obamanation to rationalize violent imagery and dehumanization.  Even some alleged feminists who support Barack Obama have either participated in or turned a blind eye towards the misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. 

And people think this is funny? (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
Barack Obama, call off your dogs before women get hurt.
Click through to watch the video.

The education of Digby (by vastleft at Corrente)
Digby on the result of her “coming out” as a woman: “My lack of gender identity precluded some of the online sexism, derision and rudeness that are so common for women writers. I’ve since been schooled in the phenomenon.”… [T]he most furious sexist attacks occurred whenever she dared evince even the slightest skepticism toward one candidate in particular. Whoever it was, he’s certainly established himself as a “change agent.”

Fla. GOP official promises to remove sign comparing Obama to Hitler, other despots (On Politics, USA Today)
“I’m speechless at the ignorance,” Broward Republican Chairman Chip LaMarca tells the Sun-Sentinel about a sign in a local Florida office of John McCain’s presidential campaign. “It’s not something we can condone.” The offending sign compares Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and other brutal tyrants because Obama and those men all called for “change” and employed “youth movements” to do it. LaMarca says the sign will be removed and that he will “find out who put it up there, and maybe they’ll volunteer somewhere else.”

Obama Faces ‘Plumber’ Protestors in Roanoke (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Sunlen Miller took this shot of some protestors outside Sen. Barack Obama’s event at the Roanoke Civic Center.
Click through for a link to the video.

8th grade textbook has Obama chapter (AP)
MADISON, Wis. — The Racine school district’s use of an eighth grade textbook that includes a chapter on Democrat Barack Obama but nothing on his opponent John McCain is unfair and troubling, the Wisconsin Republican Party argued Thursday. A parent complained on an Internet blog about the textbook that includes a chapter on Obama called ‘‘Dreams from My Father.’’

Car displaying McCain sticker vandalized (Bay News 9)
CLEARWATER — A Clearwater man’s vehicle that displayed a bumper sticker supporting John McCain has been defaced in what appears to be a hate crime, authorities say. According to authorities, 41-year-old Frank Armstrong’s 2006 Lexus LS 430 was parked on the 1400 block of Gulf Boulevard when someone or a group of people scratched the letters “KKK” into the paint and burned a U.S. Flag on the vehicle. Authorities say those involved also used cigarettes to burn several areas of the car and apparently urinated on the car.

McCain supporters defend Islam, shout down Obama attackers (On Politics, USA Today)
Christian and Muslim supporters of Republican John McCain defend Islam and drive off attackers of Democrat Barack Obama in a video posted by the American News Project.

Mid Day Open Thread (by Logan Murphy at Crooks and Liars)

Photo from Brett Marty, more from FiveThirtyEight:

Outside Obama’s major economic policy speech in Toledo…. Feels like the End Times for somebody, I am forced to report.

Culture Wars: New Yorkers give McCain supporters the finger (France24)
On the U.S. presidential campaign trail, the focus lately hasn’t been on just the candidates – but their supporters as well, with each saying the other side is out of control. Sen. John McCain tried to dial back the rhetoric late last week. And now, some of his supporters are saying their opponents are just as bad – if not worse.  Blogger Pamela Hall of the Squirrel Brigade recently participated in a march for McCain through New York City’s affluent, liberal Upper West Side – and captured some of her opponents on film as they yelled at her group. A fellow blogger from the People’s Cube edited the video and inserted some comments.
Click through to watch it.

Trader Tried to Game Political Futures Market (Political Wire)
“An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that one investor has been attempting to artificially boost the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president,” according to CQ Politics. “Over the past several weeks, a single investor has pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into the McCain-Obama market, the company said, resulting in great financial losses through a strategy that belies any financial motive.”

SAME OLD MCCAIN/SAME OLD KLEIN: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
According to [Time’s Joe] Klein, McCain’s robocalls give us a look at “John McCain, 2008 edition.” He forgot to say what he surely knows: That McCain ran robocalls in Campaign 2000—in that case, against George Bush. In some ways, those calls were worse than the calls McCain is now running. You see, McCain ran those robocalls anonymously—and he and his aides flatly lied when asked if they were running them. Pundits like Klein keep insisting that this is a new, different, vastly-changed McCain. It does make a wonderful, novelized tale. But we thought you might want to know the truth about Campaign 2000. Joe Klein knows the facts which follow. We thought you should know them too.

McCain campaign opens ‘I am Joe the Plumber’ video contest (On Politics, USA Today)
Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign continues to make ”Joe the Plumber” a big part of its campaign. It wants folks to create videos “telling us why you are ‘Joe the Plumber’ in 30 seconds.” There’s a chance, the campaign says, that the best one will end up as a McCain campaign TV ad. Go here if you want details on how to enter.

MoveOn has ‘Talking Moose’ ad ready to follow Palin around the nation (On Politics, USA Today)
Depending on your political persuasion, we expect you’ll find this new TV ad from the liberal folks at MoveOn.org Political Action either hysterically funny or just plain hysterical.
Or just plain stupid.

Tough Crowd for Obama at Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
In Fayetteville, NC, [Sunday], at Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was greeted by a 54-year-old woman shouting “Socialist! Socialist! Socialist! Get out of here!” The woman, Diane Fanning, who works at a Sam’s Club, was one of the many in the older and largely white crowd eating lunch after church services… Another diner, Cecilia Hayslip, 61, yelled back at Fanning, “At least he’s not a war-monger!”… A group of six retired women, mostly Democrats, remained undecided… Obama and his aides ordered to go chicken, collards, baked beans, slaw and wings. The tab was $13.91.
And how big was the TIP, Jake.  We came to understand during the primary how IMPORTANT the size of the TIP is.

Dead bear covered with Obama signs found at school (AP)
CULLOWHEE, N.C. – Police at Western Carolina University and wildlife officials were investigating the discovery early Monday of a deadbear cub draped with a pair of Barack Obama campaign signs. Leila Tvedt, associate vice chancellor for public relations, said Monday night that maintenance workers found the 75-pound bear cub shot to death in front of the school’s administration building at the entrance to campus. The Obama yard signs were stapled together and placed over the bear’s head, Tvedt said. The bear had been shot in the head, Tvedt said.

Obama-Backing Senator Makes Crack About McCain Wearing Adult Diapers (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
At a business summit on energy, Politickerma.com reports, a prominent supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Mass., made a crack about Sen. John McCain’s age. “These are the exciting last two week moments of the presidential campaign,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., [Monday] in Cambridge, Mass…  Barack got asked the famous boxers or briefs question… “Then they asked McCain and McCain said, ‘Depends,’” Kerry said.
Don’t you love the new sexist, ageist Democratic Party?  No?  Then you must be a racist.

Greensboro paper’s blogger attacked at Palin rally (Poynter)
Joe Killian was on assignment for the News & Record when he was kicked to the ground at a Palin rally at Elon University.

Culture Club (by Anglachel)
I believe that we have seen enugh from the Unity Democrats this year to understand that we have two very different culture wars going on… In both of these wars, what we find is the privitization of the risks of ordinary life, from health care to housing, from economic advancement to old age retirement. Policies and institutions that would defend working class power (and, increasingly, any wage-based employment, even in the so-called professions) are being deconstructed in the name of efficiency, fiscal responsibility and freedom of choice. The two theaters of operation create two sets of discourse; one focuses on the popular culture and is a battle of competing moralisms, the second one looks at economic class culture and is the consensus view of elite opinion undisturbed by the dumb-show for the groundlings. What kind of politics does that get us? I return to the anonymous political consultant (my emphasis):

“What voters are expected to believe is that after a 30-year class war against the bottom 90% of income earners, the source of their troubles are black rappers and inner city fathers and not criminality on Wall Street or a corrupt political system. The road to the White House over the past 30 years has been paved by pretending to believe the absurdity that the individuals who pull the levers of power over people’s lives are named Willie Horton, Sister Souljah and Ludicrous, and not Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Hank Paulson.”

Saturday: A House Divided (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
The [Democratic] party is at war with itself.  It’s not even a “civil” war.  Those of us who are witholding our votes from Obama have been subject to pressure, ridicule and sometimes threats of violence.  I have never seen a presidential nominee so contemptuous of voters… Republicans must be absolutely delighted … that they are about to reap the benefits of the DNC pitting women against African-Americans as well, not to mention the Whole Foods Nation against the working class.  But one thing we can be sure of is that after this election, the Democratic party will never be the same.  Our eyes have been opened.  Those of us in the Obama demographic who are women who voted for Hillary will have a hard time believing that the party has any interest in our issues.

The misogynism that was allowed to be unleashed by Obama’s campaign will haunt us for generations to come if he and the DNC are not held accountable.  If the most powerful woman in the nation can be taken out by a bunch of thugs, what is to stop businesses around the country from discriminating against us?  What will happen to women who compete with men for jobs?  What will happen to women on maternity leave coming back to work?  What will happen to women suffering from domestic violence?  If Obama is president, no one will be held accountable for the treatment meted out by testosterone poisoned men who have been given the green light to take what they want.

Barack Obama: Still Just as Clueless and Condescending as Ever (by bostonboomer at The Confluence)
In Matt Bai’s October 15th article in The New York Times, “Working for the Working Class Vote,” Barack Obama explains how much he regrets the infamous comments he made in early April: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years… So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”… [But he] still sounds like a sociologist, and he is still just as clueless about what motivates small town Americans…

Bai admits that Obama just doesn’t show the passion of someone like Bill Clinton (or Hillary!) to speak directly to the concerns of these voters. “I once heard a friend of Obama’s compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross…” Yes, that’s Barack Obama in a nutshell. He isn’t going to really ask you for your vote. He isn’t going to try to get to the heart of your unique concerns and convince you that he cares about helping you achieve your goals. It isn’t about you. It’s about Barack Obama, and his world view and what he wants to achieve in his career. If you don’t love him, it’s your fault.

Has Every Latino You Know Seen This? (by Uppity Woman at No Quarter)
If not, please show it to them.
Click through to watch the video.  “He says nothing, and does less,” says a Chicagoan in the Pilsen neighborhood, not far from where I live.  There’s some incorrect information about taxes in this ad, but the rest of it is absolutely true.  Obama has done nothing for anyone but himself and his sleazy patrons, but wants us to believe that he’ll fight for us as president.

Still Smearing Hillary (by Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft)
Josh Marshall does it still, by use of an emailer: “It should be noted that for whatever reason, McCain has so far refused to go places that Hillary went in the primary (Wright, explicit comments about ‘hard-working, white’ Americans supporting her, distributing emails with pictures of Obama in Muslim garb, etc.).” It should be noted that everyone of those charges is pure nonsense and Marshall should be ashamed for repeating them yet again… I do not believe his site when it writes something about McCain. I have to see it somewhere else before I believe it now. I just do not trust his site anymore.

McCain Campaign Reconsiders Use of Wright (Political Wire)
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told radio host Hugh Hewitt late last week that they are reconsidering using the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as an issue in the last two weeks of the presidential race. Said Davis: “Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign. Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we’re all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you’ve got to rethink all these things. And so I think we’re in the process of looking at how we’re going to close this campaign. We’ve got 19 days, and we’re taking serious all these issues.”  

Use ‘Em Then Lose ‘Em (by Pat Racimora at No Quarter)

A friend whose political analysis I greatly admire reports that he is less concerned about Obama’s corrupt and anti-white friends and connections than he is about Obama’s pattern of taking from people who can bolster his own position and then dump them out like garbage when they are no longer useful to him.

He’s Stronger Because She Wouldn’t Back Down (by Alegre)
So says Lanny Davis, Obama supporter and all around smart guy.  If Hillary had backed out when the pundits and the haters told her to “get out” or “quit”, BHO wouldn’t be nearly as strong a candidate in the general election.  She stayed in the race to give everyone a voice in our party’s nominating process, and in so doing she helped prepare him for the contest to come by testing him in head-to-head debates, and raising issues (such as Wright or Ayers) early on that could very well have sunk BHO if they’d come out today.  Because she challenged him, he’s had time to refine his message and gain more exposure to the voters.
But that’s her JOB.  She’s a girl, after all, Alegre.  When will you realize that the only job Hillary can possibly qualify for is as trainer for the younger, less qualified male.

Sunday: You don’t need permission to be angry, ladies (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
Lanny would have you believe that Hillary Clinton’s primary purpose, her divine purpose and the purpose for which she was uniquely created, was to be Barack Obama’s sparring partner.  Yes, Hillary honed him and made him the candidate we see today.  Forget your lying eyes that told you that Hillary was the better candidate and that adversity actually made her better as time went on.  Forget the notion that maybe Hillary wanted the job as much or even more than Obama did.  Forget that her ambition burned just as brightly.  As Lanny sees it, she was just Obama’s help mate…

We just sat through eight of the most reactionary years in our nation’s history.  George Bush has dragged science back into the stone age.  He’s eroded whatever safety net this stingy ass country gives women.  There we were, thrilled with the prospect that one of OUR gender, who was the absolute best candidate hands down, was going to take over the White House and start putting it all back together again.  And she was done in by her own fricking party.  Hillary Clinton could survive the media attacks.  She rose above it.  She could withstand the attacks from the Republicans.  She eventually earned their grudging respect.  But she could not survive the backstabbing manipulations and betrayal of her own party in the service of a man who wasn’t even qualified to serve as her apprentice.

Damn straight we’re angry.

Scandal train a coming. (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
A race card backlash is not the reason I’ve become sublime about Obama possibly winning. That is the sad but inevitable outcome of Obama’s degradation of the real issue all year. Real racism will not be taken nearly as seriously for a very long time. I want Obama vetted. Without excuses. I see no way this will happen in the next 2 weeks. But the job will expose him. Ask Deval Patrick who ran the campaign Obama is now running. His approval is at 38%. The numbers that have caved the most are within his core support group. “Hope and change” lasted about 6 months. Is the country at risk? Am I saying that I want to see Obama in office regardless of the consequences just so he’ll finally get vetted? No. The country will survive one BHO term. If it lasts that long. (I mean here a scandal forcing him out and nothing else.) In fact, we might actually sober up a bit.

Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case (Los Angeles Times)
SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud. State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states. Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters. The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.
Sounds a lot like ACORN’s story.

Obama Raised $150 Million Last Month (Political Wire)
Sen. Barack Obama raised more than $150 million in September, “a stunning and unprecedented eruption of political giving that has given him a wide spending advantage over rival John McCain,” according to the Associated Press. “Obama’s money is fueling a vast campaign operation in an expanding field of competitive states. It also has underwritten a wave of both national and targeted video advertising unseen before in a presidential contest.”

McCain Has Less Than $50 Million Left (Political Wire)
Sen. John McCain reports spending $37 million in September and has $47 million for the campaign in October, the AP reports. While Sen. Barack Obama raised more than $150 million in September, McCain “is no longer raising funds because he is participating in the presidential election public financing system. That restricts his spending to $84 million between early September and Election Day Nov. 4.”

IVAW members arrested while attempting to present questions to Obama and McCain (IVAW)
One hour before the final presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, fourteen members of IVAW marched in formation to Hofstra University to present questions for the candidates. 

The burning Beltway media question (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
of the day is posed by Politico: “How will news execs keep audiences interested if the presidential race is effectively decided before most Americans have finished dinner?” Because isn’t Election Day all about news producers keeping viewers “interested”?

Access to Palin’s Emails Would Cost News Orgs $15 Million (MSNBC)
The office of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state emails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the emails of Palin, her senior staff, and other state employees won’t be made public until at least several weeks after the Nov. 4 presidential election.

Secret Service Blocking Reporters at Palin Rallies
Dana Milbank: In cooperation with the Sarah Palin campaign, the Secret Service has started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty — protecting the protectee — and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things.

After McCain’s mea culpa on Letterman, Larry King wants an apology too. (Think Progress)
After abruptly canceling on him in September, last week Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) went back to David Letterman’s show, where he apologized and admitted he “screwed up.” On his blog on Friday, Larry King said that he is waiting for McCain to offer him the same courtesy, after abruptly canceling a Sept. 2 appearance.
Why do we care what these media dilettantes think or want?

Let’s play Find the Liberals (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
From the Sunday morning talk show lineup:
Fox News Sunday: John McCain
Meet the Press: Colin Powell, Chuck Todd, David Brooks, Jon Meacham, Andrea Mitchell, Joe Scarborough
Face the Nation: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former Rep. Rob Portman, Gov. Matt Blunt, Gov. Tim Kaine
Late Edition: Sen. Claire McCaskill, Rep. Roy Blunt
This Week: Newt Gingrich, Thomas Friedman, David Gergen, Donna Brazile, George Will
P.S. It’s not called Find the Democrats. It’s called Find the Liberals….

Fox News hires former NYT reporter Miller
Judith Miller will be an on-air analyst and write for Fox News Channel’s website. “She has a very impressive resume,” says Fox News exec John Moody. Regarding Miller’s WMD reporting: “She has explained herself and she has nothing to apologize for.”

Jane Velez Mitchell Gets Beck’s Old Slot (Media Bistro)
First On TVNewser: Jane Velez Mitchell has been tapped as interim anchor of the 7pm ET hour left vacant by Glenn Beck’s departure … for Fox News. Headline News will also begin re-airing Lou Dobbs’ CNN show at 9pmET.

Fresh Face on Cable, Sharp Rise in Ratings (New York Times)
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has doubled the audience for the cable channel’s 9 p.m. hour in a matter of days.

Former FBNY Editor Rachel Sklar Leaving HuffPo (Gawker)
Rachel Sklar managed to last a jaw-dropping two-and-a-half years in at HuffPo, a rare achievement that saw her become one of the site’s highest-profile editors and a frequent cable-TV talking head. In a memo announcing the move, Arianna Huffington quotes Sklar as saying she is leaving “to finally finish that Goddamn book.”

Solutions (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Over at Nieman Watchdog, Dan Froomkin summarizes a panel discussion of the media’s failure to challenge the Bush administration’s Iraq spin, including some suggestions for how to improve.  Here’s one of the best: “Acknowledge scoops by rival news organizations, then follow them up, like a relay team… Tom Rosensteil, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the panel’s moderator, pointed out: ‘[T]hat’s very much the model that scientists use in trying to investigate a problem, who do not work in large institutions but really sort of work as singular researchers in collaboration with each other.’” It’s been striking how much this hasn’t happened over the past 8 years — particularly to anyone who remembers how the Times and Post spent the Clinton era trying to one-up each other on the phony Whitewater story.
And don’t forget the phony Gore stories.  Meanwhile, the media are treating Obama in exactly the same way they treated George W. Bush.  If that doesn’t scare you, you have simply not been paying attention.

Obama assembles U.S.’s ‘largest law firm’ to monitor election (Bloomberg)
Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy. Both candidates have armies of volunteers to ring doorbells and get voters to the polls. They are also forming squadrons of lawyers who are filing challenges and preparing in case Election Day doesn’t settle the contest for the White House. Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.

Some early W. Va. voters angry over switched votes (Charleston Gazette, WV)
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win. Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk’s office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates… When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge “responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail.” Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

Arizona To Enforce Dress Code For Voters (KPHO Phoenix)
PHOENIX – State and Maricopa County election officials say they will enforce a strict dress code for voters on Nov. 4, despite complaints from civil liberties groups that this may violate the First Amendment. Arizona campaign laws bar voters and poll workers from wearing anything with a political message within 75 feet of a polling site. And county officials say they will actively enforce the rule, asking voters to turn their clothing inside out or cover up. They’ll also ask voters to remove political buttons, stickers and pins before they enter the polls. However, the American Civil Liberties Union now argues that “strict and inflexible” interpretation violates voters’ freedom of speech and could deny them the opportunity to cast a ballot.

Krugman isn’t interested in Treasury secretary job
“I’m just temperamentally unsuited,” says Paul Krugman. “I don’t want any kind of administration job. I think that it’s better for me, the country, and general mental health to have me on the outside.”
He’s not the kind of team player you have to be to be a cabinet member.  And to me, that’s a good thing.

A tiny bit of good news:
Better (by Paul Krugman)
Many signs this morning that the money markets are unfreezing.

Workers who rely on gratuities are seeing fewer customers and lower tips (McClatchy)
The pint glass that doubles as a tip jar at Jesse Del Pozo’s barber station used to be stuffed with cash, even a few fives and tens peeking out by day’s end.

Some private schools losing students because of economic slump (McClatchy)
For some families these days, paying thousands of dollars in private-school tuition is proving too much of a strain.

Economic crisis hurting students’ ability to pay for college (McClatchy)
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana — Late Thursday evening, Neal Theobald, Indiana University’s vice chancellor for budget administration, received a sobering letter from Sallie Mae, the nation’s leading provider of student loans.

Baby Boomers on the Brink (McClatchy)
Instead of globetrotting or building their dream homes, many San Luis Obispo County baby boomers could be pinching pennies in their retirement years, according to a recent Tribune survey.

Big bankers grab $70 billion of the $250 billion we just gave them for salaries, bonuses (by lambert at Corrente)
Happy days on Wall Street! And to think I imagined there was some kind of crisis! Guardian: “Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.” Imagine how much they would have made in a good year!… Say, when Obama was making his calls on behalf of the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Paulson big bank giveaway, do you think he knew this would happen?

Obscure Tax Breaks Increase Cost of Financial Rescue (Wall Street Journal)
The $700 billion financial rescue package approved by Congress to shore up banks also carries a parallel bailout of the financial sector and other industries through a series of obscure tax breaks. Operating mostly under the radar screen, Congress, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have been rolling back various provisions of the tax code to help out industries and investors caught up in the turmoil. The most costly — and most controversial — of the moves provide billions in extra tax relief to big banks such as Wells Fargo & Co. and Spain’s Banco Santander SA. Another change gives aid to investors stung by the auction-rate securities meltdown. Still another shift relaxes tax rules to help big multinationals bring back cash from overseas. The total sums involved aren’t clear, but the cost will easily amount to tens of billions of dollars, tax experts say.

Consensus Emerges to Let Deficit Rise (New York Times)
Like water rushing over a river’s banks, the federal government’s rapidly mounting expenses are overwhelming the federal budget and increasing an already swollen deficit. The bank bailout, in the latest big outlay, could cost $250 billion in just the next few weeks, and a newly proposed stimulus package would have $150 billion or more flowing from Washington before the next president takes office in January. Adding to the damage is that tax revenues fall as the economy weakens; this is likely just as the government needs hundreds of billions of dollars to repair the financial system. The nation’s wars are growing more costly, as fighting spreads in Afghanistan. And a declining economy swells outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other federal aid. But the extra spending, a sore point in normal times, has been widely accepted on both sides of the political aisle as necessary to salvage the banking system and avert another Great Depression.

Mortgage firm arranged stealth campaign (AP)
Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and Fannie Mae, 3 years before the government took control to prevent their collapse. 

Freddie Mac, AIG, JPMorgan Helped Stage Republican Convention (Bloomberg)
Freddie Mac and American International Group, companies bailed out by the government as the financial crisis unfolded, each contributed $250,000 for last month’s Republican National Convention, FEC filings show… The U.S. government took over McLean, Virginia-based Freddie and Washington-based Fannie Mae last month, saying that a rise in mortgage defaults threatened the two companies.

Building Flawed American Dreams (New York Times)
SAN ANTONIO — A grandson of Mexican immigrants and a former mayor of this town, Henry G. Cisneros has spent years trying to make the dream of homeownership come true for low-income families. As the Clinton administration’s top housing official in the mid-1990s, Mr. Cisneros loosened mortgage restrictions so first-time buyers could qualify for loans they could never get before. Then, capitalizing on a housing expansion he helped unleash, he joined the boards of a major builder, KB Home, and the largest mortgage lender in the nation, Countrywide Financial — two companies that rode the housing boom, drawing criticism along the way for abusive business practices. And Mr. Cisneros became a developer himself.

F.B.I. Struggles to Handle Financial Fraud Cases  (New York Times)
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials. The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes… So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Stimulus: The World Is Different in October Than it Was In January (by Dean Baker)
Actually, the world may not be that different, but the surprised economists know more about the economy’s problems today than they did back in January. That is why the Post did its readers a disservice when it cited the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) assessment of various types of stimulus from January in discussing the potential shape of a new stimulus package.

USA Today Hasn’t Heard About the Housing Crash (by Dean Baker)
That is the only thing that readers of an article about the poor retirement prospects of the baby boomers can conclude. The article notes the decline of traditional pensions and the limited amount of money that workers have accumulated in 401(k)s, and it also raises nonsense concerns about Social Security. (The program is projected to be fully solvent through the lifetime of most baby boomers with no changes whatsoever.) However, the article does not include a word about the huge loss of home equity that most baby boomers have suffered in the last couple of years.

NYT’s Flacid Fact Checking (by Dean Baker)
The NYT takes Senator Obama to task for claiming that Senator McCain would cut Medicare by $882 billion (@13 percent) over the next decade. The article explains that this claim is derived from Senator McCain’s claim that he would pay for his tax plans by savings from Medicare and Medicaid. The article points out that Senator McCain never explicitly claimed that he would cut $882 billion from Medicare. While the NYT can accurately say that Obama is making important assumptions in his attack that may not be correct, the more important issue is that Senator McCain is proposing a policy that will require large budget cuts and he has not told the public where he would make these cuts. While it is fine to tell readers that Obama’s assumptions may be wrong, this belongs in a larger story that reports on the unspecified budget cuts that Senator McCain will need to pay for his tax cuts.

PUBLIC OPINION: Regulation Makes a Comeback (by Ruy Teixeira, Center for American Progress)
The public now overwhelmingly wants more business regulation—a big change from the Reagan era.

From investigative reporter Evelyn Pringle, via email, regarding a series of articles she wrote detailing Illinois corruption:

According to an email I received, in a daily newsletter or memo to members, Rob Kall said I was second in drawing the most readers to OpEd News but he thought it was because I was a Hillary supporter and I had [written] a series of articles “attacking” Obama.

He told members that he was considering whether to remove the articles.

When I got the email, I responded that this was the first I heard of it and would be outraged if he removed the series. I said I did not write the articles because I was a Hillary supporter that I wrote them because my investigation turned up what it did about Obama and I could hardly not write about it simply because he was a Democrat.

I explained that shortly after I started publishing the series, I posted my reasoning for writing the articles and told readers that if they found any factual statements that were false or untrue to contact me by the email I listed and show me where I was wrong and I would make a correction.

Not one person contacted me to challenge anything written in the 10 articles.

Yesterday I received an email in my OpEd mailbox asking what happened to my articles and when I went and checked they were gone. I was not given any notice that they were being removed and I was outraged.

I have been a columnist for OpEd News for probably 2 years. Well over 100 of my articles have been published on that site. Rob Kall has never before refused to publish anything I have written much less removed an article months after it appeared on OpEd.

I did not set out to find the corruption that engulfs Obama. I was as surprised as anyone else at what I found. However, as a journalist and a human being, after conducting a 2 and a half month investigation, I had a duty to write truthful reports just as I have done many times in the past with Republicans.

Rob Kall’s attempt to suppress the findings of my investigation will not succeed because the entire Obama series is still available on the Scoop and Counter Currents websites, as well as several others. After learning what happened on OpEd, other websites have contacted me and offered to republish all the articles in full.

For obvious reasons, from this day forward I will no longer be affiliated with OpEd News in any capacity. I will not have my name associated with an internet daily that can no longer be trusted to publish uncensored truthful information for the American public regardless of who it pertains to.

You can read Pringle’s articles at Scoop:

Barack Obama – The Wizard of Oz - March 29 2008

Barack Obama – Operation Board Games For Slumlords - Apr 7, 2008

Barack Obama – Subplots of Operation Board Games – Apr 21, 2008

Curtain Time For Barack Obama – Part I  - May 13, 2008

Curtain Time for Barack Obama – Part II – May 14, 2008

Curtain Time for Barack Obama - Part III – May 16, 2008

Scoop: Curtain Time for Barack Obama – Part IV – May 17, 2008

Curtain Time for Barack Obama – Part V – May 19, 2008

Final Chapter – Curtain Time for Barack Obama – May 24, 2008

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Racist GOP mailing depicts Obama surrounded by KFC, watermelon, and food stamps. (Think Progress)
A local California GOP women’s organization’s most recent newsletter claims that if Obama is elected, his face will appear on food stamps, rather than dollar bills like other presidents. The group then included a picture of “Obama Bucks” — a phony $10 bill with Obama surrounded by racist imagery:

The president of the organization, Diane Fedele, didn’t understand the charges of racism: “I didn’t see it the way that it’s being taken. I never connected. It was just food to me.” One African-American member of the club said that upon seeing the newsletter, she “cried for 45 minutes.” “This is what keeps African-Americans from joining the Republican Party,” she added.
Remember when the Conventional Wisdom was that Obama was a better candidate for the Democrats than Hillary because they would attack her on a lot of nonexistent stuff and no one would dare attack Obama on race?  And remember that the nonexistent stuff attacks on Hillary came from the so-called left, and not the right?

Ex-editor Lundy gets to the bottom of WBT radio’s constant attacks on Obama (Poynter Online)
Walker Lundy says the talkers on Charlotte’s WBT radio manage to conclude — on every issue every day — that Barack Obama is dangerous and disloyal to America. The former Philly Inquirer editor called the station’s general manager for an explanation. Rick Jackson told him it’s not politics, just business. “Two things drive me: the dollar for our shareholders and protecting our license. We go where our listeners tell us they want us to go.”

The Brainy Governor of New York Can’t Name Any Obama Accomplishments (by SusanUnPC at No Quarter)
Can anyone provide a list of substantive accomplishments that Barack Obama can claim, besides winning office and going to college? The one executive job Obama had — when Bill Ayers hired him to chair the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge — meant that he had to carry out Bill Ayers’ radical school reform initiatives, at which he was a miserable failure since the entire project was a failure. Then there’s the one chairmanship that Obama was given in the U.S. Senate, as [chair] of the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee… [H]e never held a single hearing… Now there’s this: “MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS: ‘Can you give me a case where Barack Obama has reached across the aisle and cut a deal and gotten something done for the country? One example.’ GOVERNOR PATERSON: ‘Well, Senator Obama has been there two years and I can’t cite an example right now.’”
Click through to watch the video.

Part 2–Independent Thinking: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY/LATRINE NEEDS THE TY-D-BOL MAN (by InsightAnalytical-GRL)
While cleaning the toilet the other day, the Democratic Party came to mind…I’m not kidding!… I knelt down to pick up something on the floor and lo and behold!  I saw stuff I hadn’t noticed before, stuff I thought I was getting cleaned when I scrubbed the bowl.  But NO!  I had missed the buildup around the thin line of little round holes at the very top of the bowl, hidden under the rim…. I HAD MISSED THE HIDDEN CRUD!…

[T]he entire episode suddenly reminded me of how we’ve been waking up to what’s under the facade that is the Democratic Party, how we’re seeing “under the rim.”  Taking impeachment off the table, the failure to take on the Medicare Part D prescription gift to Big Pharma, the primary caucus system, the intimidation, the misogyny, Florida, Michigan, the secret fix that was engineered and the disgraceful actions of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, the unqualified candidate who getst away with playing the race card to the point of turning Bill Clinton into a “racist,” the hatred of BOTH Clintons, the money thrown without oversight to “community groups,” the ties to ACORN and the mortgage mess, the current corruption of the voting process by the same group and Obama’s ties to the group, the whole idea of being OK with the likes of William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko…

[T]his is the Democratic Party that we’re supposed to keep following blindly? I don’t think so… like the scum hiding in my supposedly clean toilet, the crud of the Democratic Party has been exposed and I’ve decided to flush the Democratic leadership down the toilet, where they all belong.

FBI launches probe into ACORN over voter registrations (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — A day after John McCain charged that the liberal-leaning voter registration group ACORN “may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history,” it was disclosed Thursday that the FBI is investigating whether the group coordinated the filing of phony applications.

ObamACORN? (by garychapelhill at The Confluence)
[A] lot of people say [questions about Obama’s relationship with ACORN] is a bunch of nonsense, and that it is typical Republican grandstanding about an organization that does a lot of good.  OK then, if that’s true, why is Barack Obama running away from them so fast that he feels he has to lie to the American people about his association with them?  I’d think he’d be proud of it.  Or maybe he’s started lying so much he doesn’t know when to tell the truth.  No matter what, I don’t think I trust him to be President of the United States.

Oopsies! Does this mean ACORN is calling Obama a liar? Sure sounds like it! (The Real Barack Obama)
Carla Marinucci reports in today’s San Francisco Chronicle “In last night’s debate, Sen. John McCain suggested that ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was responsible for massive voter fraud that could destroy ”the fabric of democracy.” Now the leaders of the community organizing group have emerged with an aggressive effort to push back. “In a conference call … ACORN organizers[told reporters] that Sen. Barack Obama, as a local elected official in Chicago, participated in two training sessions for 50 volunteer leaders. In addition, he and his law firm represented a group of plantiffs, including ACORN, regarding motor votor registration issues. They said his campaign has also provided about $80,000 in funding to an independent consulting group, which in turn provided some funding to ACORN to get out the vote.”

McCain comeback? One poll shows him within 2 points (Hot off the Trail, McClatchy)
Is John McCain starting to stage a comeback? Perhaps, according to new poll numbers from Gallup, the respected polling organization. McCain is now within two percentage points of Barack Obama in one Gallup poll, trailing by just 49-47 percent. He trails by wider margins in other Gallup polls. But even there, he gained in recent days leading up to Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate.

Ipsos/McClatchy debate poll: McCain improved, Obama won (McClatchy)
WASHINGTON — John McCain did better in his final debate with Barack Obama than he had in the two previous ones, but Obama still won it, according to a new online Ipsos/McClatchy survey of undecided voters.

Question of the day (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Marc Ambinder … mentioned “Joe The Plumber” 11 times on his blog before mocking others for looking into the guy’s background.  Two consecutive (and three total) Ambinder posts put “Joe The Plumber” in the headline.  Seven minutes after the debate ended, Ambinder announced: “Tonight’s winner: Joe the plumber.”… But now that people are pointing out that Wurzelbacher is a Republican who hates Social Security — and who not only would not face a tax increase under Obama, he’d likely get a larger tax cut from Obama than he would from McCain — well, suddenly, Marc Ambinder has heard enough about Joe The Plumber. Maybe it’s distracting him from trying to come up with evidence to support his claims that the media is paying more attention to Christopher Buckley than to ACORN.

Senator Joe Biden (MBNA-DE) (by dakinikat at The Confluence)
I about fell off my chair listening to the third presidential debates when Senator Obama suggested that Senator Biden was some how a champion of middle America and the little guy. Senator Obama evidently has forgotten about two things for which we can thank Joe Biden.  The first is the current bankruptcy bill which makes it difficult for folks who get into financial trouble for things like unemployment and overwhelming health catastrophy costs to ever recover financially and lead normal lives again. The second is that he’s never met a credit card company supported bill he doesn’t like.

Ladies, Are You Sure You Can Pull That Lever All By Yourself? (by madamab at The Confluence)
I forced myself to watch the debate [Wednesday] night… [W]hat really stood out for me was when the candidates started talking about Supreme Court judges and, by extension, Roe v. Wade and abortion… Here was Obama’s answer. “…Now I would not provide a litmus test. But I am somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was rightly decided. I think that abortion is a very difficult issue and it is a moral issue and one that I think good people on both sides can disagree on. But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision (emphasis mine)…” Didja catch that, ladies?… It never occurs to Senator Obama that women can make these decisions without “consulting with” anyone… Well, Barack darling, you’ll find there are a lot of decisions women can make all by themselves. And you’ll see how we decide on Election Day.

What’s the point of broadcasting dial-testing results during a debate? (Poynter Online)
Besides goosing CNN’s ratings. “It has no scientific validity — it’s not a sample of anything that has generalized validity,” says Rutgers Univeristy’s Cliff Zukin.

Lunch Break – The Left’s Big blunder (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
[S]o many of us have been in uncomfortable situations what with the blanketing and suffocating pro Obama atmosphere. This piece looks at the phenomenon. I know that when stating a simple “I don’t like Obama” I’ve been received with baffled looks and that “well, I guess John must have a problem with race” look. The damage inflicted by the Obama Left on race relations in this country is incalculable. The seething resentment among Black Americans for real or perceived racism -is being transferred to a seething resentment among white non Obama supporters for being CALLED racist – overtly or covertly and almost always unjustly.

“In such an environment, where admitting to disliking Obama in the interpersonal sphere has become the equivalent of social suicide, it seems very likely that the Bradley Effect is not just back, but back with a vengeance. The more that Obama supporters go unchallenged in their blanket accusations of racism against McCain supporters, the less likely anyone will publicly admit to dislike of Obama. Hence, the Bradley Effect is not an artifact of racism, but rather an artifact of false accusations of racism.”

Threat on Kos against Hillary (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
I should update a point made in earlier posts. On several occasions, I’ve noted that Markos Moulitsas printed a death threat against Hillary Clinton: “And a Drive-By Won’t Be Out of the Question. What goes around, comes around. The stupid fucking bitch !!” That quote remained on the site for some days — and I am not the only one to have seen it — but is not there now. I would note that one or two Obots objected to the word “bitch” but did not object to the call for murder. This lack of any disapproving commentary proves that ALL Kossacks are thugs. 

The same commenter, one jcarter, left a follow-up remark which remains on that page: “Talk About WHITE TRASH that bitch better keep looking over her shoulder.” Obviously, these words are also meant to be taken as a threat.
Tell me: Why is “White Trash” accept terminology on Kos? What would Obama supporters say about Cannonfire if I allowed my commenters to use terms like “black trash”?

Unfounded Allegations (by gqmartinez at Corrente)
“Secret Service says ‘Kill him’ allegation unfounded”… [A] pattern I am noticing more and more is the liberal charge that crazy, “erratic” McCain supporters (or Republicans) are plotting something heinous. Further, there is a quick [sleight] of hand to implicate any and all McCain supporters/GOPers … with threats that could be made from genuinely unstable McCain supporters/GOPers that pose the real threats. Are we going to trivialize death threats the same way we trivialized racism? If Obama does win and we disagree with his policies, are we going to be called racists or, worse, be implicated in plots against him? Death threats are real and, in my view, very serious. Throwing out unfounded allegations to tarnish the opposition is not only a disgusting tactics, but it takes away focus from the real threats that may be out there.

McCain aides privately call Palin a ‘total disaster.’ (Think Progress)
On Salon Radio [Thursday] morning, Glenn Greenwald asked Harper’s Scott Horton about his recent reporting on how Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol lobbied the McCain campaign to select Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as the Republican vice presidential nominee. Horton explained that the McCain campaign is now regretting following Kristol’s advice, calling the Palin pick a “total disaster“.
I do not believe this claim for a minute.  Palin is drawing huge crowds whenever she speaks.  The only disaster is the awful way she’s been treated by the so-called progressive media.

‘Wash Post’ and ‘SF Chronicle’ Endorse Obama (Editor & Publisher)
“The choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain’s disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president,” the Post declares. “It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Mr. Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race.” 

Politico and the coming Election Day “meltdown” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
The headline reads, “Experts warn of Nov. 4 voting meltdowns,” and the article is about all the new voters being put on the rolls and whether states, especially Ohio and Florida will be able to handle the stress on Election Day. But it turns out the only ones warning about a “meltdown” are editors at Politico. Because none of the experts quoted in the story use that kind of doomsday language. Instead, most sound like Kimball Brace, from Election Data Services, which advises local government on election administration. Brace told Politico, “There’s still reason to be concerned in terms of what’s going to take place in November.” That’s a long way from “meltdown” talk. This seems to be a case of editors pushing a provocative theme that reporters haven’t quite nailed down.   

‘Tennessee Tribune’ List Of Non-Voters Stirs Controversy (Editor & Publisher)
CHICAGO Tennessee Tribune Publisher Rosetta Miller-Perry says she doesn’t mind embarrassing people if it makes them do the right thing. The right thing to do, she argues, is vote in the upcoming presidential election — so she’s embarrassing hundreds of registered voters who didn’t go to the polls in 2004. In its latest edition, Miller-Perry’s black-oriented Nashville weekly published the names and addresses of non-voting registered voters living in largely African-American precincts. A local TV station interviewed several people angry about finding their names and addresses on the list, especially since they believed they had valid reasons they missed the 2004 vote.

TV station hits mute button when candidate makes erroneous statement about banks (Poynter Online)
WFMZ-TV muted the sound and blurred the lips of Lehigh Valley Democratic congressional candidate Sam Bennett as she wrongly stated in a taped debate that Sovereign and Wachovia banks had folded. “We did not feel that broadcasting the names of the banks served the public in any way,” says the station’s general manager. But Poynter’s Kelly McBride says that “ultimately the voters deserve to know what information this candidate got wrong.”

Air America outlasts expectations. (Inside Radio)
Created to counterbalance conservative talk radio, Air America was viewed by many in the industry as a vanity project that delivered bad ratings, no revenues and was destined to fail. Four years later it survives, with more than 50 affiliates and a plan to recast itself as a multimedia content provider.

Fox News tops primetime cable ratings (Hollywood Reporter)
NEW YORK – Fox News Channel leaped to the top ratings slot in primetime for all of basic cable, the second time this year.  Nielsen Media Research pegged Fox the top-ranked network in primetime, ahead of the general entertainment channels, as well as its cable news competitors. That included other channels like ESPN with “Monday Night Football.” Fox News was also in second place in total day, behind Nickelodeon. Fox News’ strength came from its regular programming in the weeks before the election as well as strong ratings in the second presidential debate. Exclusive interviews with John McCain and Sarah Palin on “Hannity & Colmes” and Palin on “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” also contributed.

Glenn Beck to join Fox News next spring. (Think Progress)
Michael Calderone reports that right-wing talker Glenn Beck is leaving CNN and joining Fox News. “Beginning next spring, Beck will host FOX News Channel’s (FNC) 5 PM/ET weekday program as well as a weekend show on the network,” a Fox News statement says. Fox News’s Roger Ailes remarked, “As we embark on a new political landscape, Glenn’s thought provoking commentary will complement an already stellar line-up of stars at FOX News.” Check out some of Beck’s worst moments here.

Cramer Counterattack (New York Post)
Cable news channel CNBC is airing a new spot boosting “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer after rival Fox Business Network ran ads attacking his credibility. The CNBC ad – with the tagline “In Cramer We Trust” – draws on a monologue from a recent show in which he weighed in on the government’s bank bailout: “Bottom line: The new plan does not save the market. It just takes another Great Depression off the table.”

Making “Who Could Have Known?” Unacceptable: The Key to Popping Bubbles (by Dean Baker)
Suppose that in 2002, instead of testifying that there is no housing bubble, Alan Greenspan tells Congress that he is very worried about the unprecedented run-up in house prices… Suppose that he repeated these comments again and again with supporting evidence. Suppose that Greenspan had the Fed staff grinding out papers documenting the evidence that there was a housing bubble and projecting the damage to various banks and other financial institutions from its collapse. Will everyone panic and reverse their irrational exuberance? That would be my bet… Does anyone think that the execs at Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and the rest could say “who could have known?” to their shareholders, who just saw most of the value of their stock disappear? My guess is that all of these execs would be out of their jobs and facing lawsuits for neglecting their responsibilities to their shareholders.

As Economic Storm Brewed, Congressional Wealth Grew 11% Last Year (Capital Eye)
WASHINGTON — An economic recession is looking increasingly likely, but the personal finances of members of Congress suggest they will be able to withstand the slowdown far better than most Americans, according to a new analysis of lawmakers’ latest personal financial reports by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. U.S. senators had a median net worth of approximately $1.7 million in 2007, the most recent year for which their financial data is available, and 61 percent of the Senate’s members could be considered millionaires. In the House of Representatives, the median net worth was about $684,000, with 39 percent of members having net worths estimated to be at least $1 million. By contrast, only about 1 percent of all American adults can be considered millionaires. Growth between 2006 and 2007 was still a healthy 11 percent, despite indications last year that the economy was headed south.

FDIC chief knocks bailout package (by DCblogger at Corrente)
Investment News “The $700,000 billion financial services industry bailout plan has a critic in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair, who said yesterday the initiative does not do enough to prevent Americans from losing their homes, The Wall Street Journal reported today.” At some point Versailles will work out that the well being of the big shots is connected to the well being of the little guys.

The Credit Crunch and the Recession (by Dean Baker)
[T]here has been a tendency in the media to attribute all the bad news in the economy to the financial crisis, as is the case with [a] front page article in the Washington Post. Firms will always cut back expansion plans during a downturn, even if credit is readily available. Of course, credit will be less readily available for many firms in a downturn, even when the financial system is operating normally. The reason is that weak firms become much worse credit risk in a downturn.

Dow ends up 401 in another stunning Up-turn (AP)
A stock market as difficult to fathom as it is volatile pulled off another stunning U-turn on Thursday, transforming a 380-point loss for the Dow Jones industrials into a 401-point gain. Was it the government’s bailout beginning to have an effect? The credit markets finally beginning to loosen up? Investors looking for a bottom in stocks? Wall Street seemed sure of this much: The whipsawing will continue. So buckle up.

European markets bounce after Dow lift (CNN)
European sharemarkets opened higher Friday, only a day after they slipped to new lows on the back of recession fears.

Asia stock markets mixed after Wall Street rebound (AP)
HONG KONG – World stock markets were mixed Friday after Wall Street rebounded strongly overnight, with Japanese shares recovering from a historic fall in the previous session.

Social Security benefits going up by 5.8 percent (AP)
Social Security benefits for 50 million people will go up 5.8 percent next year, the largest increase in more than a quarter century. The increase, which will start in January, was announced Thursday by the Social Security Administration. It will mean an additional $63 per month for the average retiree.

New Feature on OpenSecrets.org: Lobbyists’ Campaign Contributions (Capital Eye)
Thanks to a 2007 change in Congress’s ethics laws, federal lobbyists and their employers must now disclose their campaign contributions. It’s their personal money, but it may have been contributed with a professional goal in mind. OpenSecrets.org now lets you see which individual lobbyists are giving the most money to federal politicians (and where they work and to whom they’re contributing), which organizations are represented by these lobbyists, and the lawmakers who are collecting the most from these professional influence-peddlers. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that lobbyists give more money to the party in power — Democrats — and they overwhelmingly favor incumbents over challengers. You can check out this new, searchable feature here.

Media Matters for America headlines

• Radio host Bob Grant asserted that Obama created an ” ‘O’ flag,” but apparent flag in question was Ohio’s

• CNN’s Amy Holmes falsely asserted that in first debate, Obama said “he would sacrifice … energy policy”

• In two separate items, Wash. Post misled on Obama’s response to Lewis statement

• Scarborough misquoted Obama regarding Lewis remarks, then called the statement Obama didn’t make “shocking” and “staggering”

• MSNBC’s Shuster’s suggestion that Obama “bear[s] a certain responsibility to clarify” Jackson’s Israel remarks is based on false distinction

• MSNBC’s Hall said “it would be rude to ask Joe [the Plumber] what his income is” — but it’s key issue

• Wash. Post uncritically quoted McCain misrepresenting Biden’s proposal for Iraq

• CNN’s Bash noted that McCain will continue to claim Obama is “going to raise your taxes” — but not that it isn’t true

• CNN’s Bennett asked of Lewis’ statement about McCain campaign, “Why didn’t Obama say it was wrong?” — but Obama did

China urged to prolong relaxed reporting rules
BEIJING, Oct 16 (Reuters) – China should extend indefinitely relaxed reporting rules for foreign journalists introduced for the Olympics and apply them to the Chinese media as well, Human Rights Watch said in a statement. As part of Beijing’s bid to host the August Games, it promised to allow complete media freedom, including letting foreign reporters interview anyone without first getting government permission, though the state’s grip over domestic media did not ease. But that freedom is due to expire on Friday. “While there were serious problems in implementing Olympics-related media freedom regulations, they did mark a new and much higher standard in Chinese law for reporting freedom,” said Human Rights Watch Asia advocacy director Sophie Richardson.

Vietnam journalist jailed for exposing scandal
A Vietnamese journalist who exposed transport ministry officials who were embezzling foreign aid to bet on European football matches, was yesterday jailed for two years. Nguyen Viet Chien was convicted of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state”… Mr Nguyen told the court: “I never have any other purpose in mind when writing my reports but exposing wrongdoing.”

Doha Centre for Media Freedom launched
The Doha Centre for Media Freedom was launched [Thursday] in the presence of Dr. Hamad al-Kuwari, Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, who is also President of the centre’’s Advisory Council as well as a number of members of its Board of Governors and media persons… The Centre is a meeting-place that emphasizes exchanges and dialogue between people… It conducts on-the-spot fact-finding missions to listen to all sides, pinpoint the obstacles dividing the authorities from civil society and restart dialogue between them. The centre organizes meetings, seminars and conferences where journalists and media figures from various countries talk about issues, learn new things, plan to work together and find solutions to problems. The Centre also coordinates a media network ready to give urgent help to journalists and media outlets in difficulty.

A government bailout of newspapers is “a terrible idea,” says Abrams
“What would happen is newspapers would then focus on this ultra-elite point-five-percent and create these papers that are just unreachable to a mass audience,” says Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams. “I think for government to come in and force this intellectual thing would be terrible. It’d almost be like in 1950, with rock-n-roll coming, all the sudden the government comes in to support classical music.”

New Ways of Financing Journalism Will be Found, Georgia Journalists Say at NPC Forum
The future of journalism may be in niche products supported less by advertising and more by corporate sponsorships, by interest groups and by public broadcasting-style memberships, leading Georgia journalists said at a National Press Club Centennial Forum here Tuesday. While Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, described how her paper is pulling back its reporting to the core four counties in the metropolitan area, Susanna Capelouto, news director for Georgia Public Broadcasting, said her organization is expanding. “The reason public broadcasting is doing so well is that they can specialize on the ‘why’ of journalism,” Capelouto said. “They make the connection, they tell the story, and they are supported by their members, so the pressure isn’t there.”

College Network Makes Big Cuts
CBS College Sports said that it was laying off nearly one-quarter of its staff, signifying the network’s shift from studio programs to increased high-definition event coverage.

Progressive journalism (by Jeff Jarvis)
On my “run” through a wet Hamburg [Thursday] morning, I listened, as is now my daily habit, to the NPR Planet Money podcast. The show – made by Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Laura Conaway, and David Kenstenbaum – is a superb example of journalism as process not product… Planet Money’s narrative unfolds with the news itself. They don’t try to tie up all the loose ends by the end of each podcast. Instead, they tell us that they’ll follow this angle or that and answer open questions. The other day, for example, an interviewee told Davidson that the bailout money could be used by banks to pay dividends or buy back stock. He said just what I was thinking: Our blood was boiling. He didn’t have the rest of that story then. Instead, he told us that he’d be sure to follow the angle. The audience also joins in, asking questions, which the Planet Money team patiently and intelligently answers. This, too, forms the podcast. It’s a process.

Ten small things you can do now to reinvent your newsroom
First on Chris O’Brien’s list is “Start a wiki.” He writes: “This is a great way to start experimenting with changing your relationship with your community. …It gives you a chance to start soliciting content generated outside the newsroom.”

At the Times-Picayune, “there’s no pretending to be objective”
Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose on his paper’s post-Katrina voice: “There’s no question that from the day it came down, the notion of objective journalism was washed away with everything else in this town. I don’t think the paper has ever pretended to be objective since. We write with a really interesting edge and a real gripping tone, which is why I think we’re the most relevant local paper in the country.”

Palm Beach Post hires Magid consulting firm “to help shape our future”
The Palm Beach Post, which cut 300 employees earlier this year, has hired Frank N. Magid Associates for “a six-month project that will involve extensive research with readers and advertisers plus intensive strategy sessions with members of our staff and the Magid team.” During the buildup to the Iraq War, Magid warned clients that coverage of war protests “turned off news consumers.”

Tribune Considers Dropping AP Wire Service Within Two Years (Paid Content)
The Tribune Company is the latest newspaper publisher to give the Associated Press notice that it is considering dropping its services in two years, E&P reported.  In a statement emailed to paidContent, Tribune said it was simply a cost-cutting measure. As for the AP, the company also issued a statement: “We understand that in this climate a lot of newspapers are reexamining their strategies. The Associated Press will continue to work with all members of the cooperative to ensure that we are providing the most efficient, valued and essential news service for them.”

Google’s Net (and Stock) Rise Sharply
Third-quarter profit increased 26 percent to $1.35 billion, a strong showing that might be enough to reassure jittery investors.

The Google economy, indeed (by Jeff Jarvis)
Google does indeed have its own economy. It’s latest results: “The Web search leader reported third-quarter earnings that far exceeded the expectations of analysts, especially those who thought the company might finally fall victim to the slumping economy. Thanks largely to having contained costs better than in previous quarters, Google reported on Oct. 16 that profit rose 26%, to $1.35 billion, significantly higher than analysts had predicted. Sales jumped 31%, to $5.54 billion.” The analysts are stumped because they are not judging Google as a new kind of company in a new kind of economy. It’s different.

Yahoo Bows Unified Social Media Profile (Paid Content)
Yahoo recently shut down its fledgling social media site Mash, but that didn’t derail all of its social media plans. Today it launched a unified profile feature that lets users access (and eventually control) their various social media personas across the Web. It’s part of the company’s “open” strategy (Y!OS), which gives developers and other third parties access to a number of Yahoo platforms through a set of APIs. The strategy has already spawned two search plays, Yahoo BOSS and Search Monkey, each with varying levels of customization. Users of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 have already started seeing some of the profile integrations, as the IM client pulls in their friends’ Twitter, Yahoo Buzz and Mybloglog updates. Deeper integration into Yahoo Mail is slated to come next, as well as a customizable homepage. 

ISPs pressed to become child porn cops
Internet service providers are moving closer to becoming cops on the lookout for child pornography, able to monitor every e-mail and Web search for illegal images.

PikLuk Puts Parents in Control of Childrens’ Browsing | The Startup Review (Mashable)
PikLuk, launched out of Austin, Texas, is in and of itself a Web browser. The project’s modus operandi: to give parents the ability to locally or remotely control what it is their children can see. This means any websites that parents deem suitable for their kids’ exploration can be designated as safe. Don’t mind your son or daughter signing on to a particular social network? You can specify what is and what isn’t okay to be viewed with your PikLuk installation. Restrictions can also be set for email correspondence. If you only want family members and/or immediate friends to be able to contact your child, you can make sure this is the case.

Discovery CEO: Web ‘Take-up Rate Is Not That Strong’ (Paid Content)
Cable programmer Discovery is making its first foray in ad-supported, free-to-air TV on the UK’s Freeview. (It’s not free for Discovery, which is reported to be paying millions of pounds for the privilege.) But somehow Thursday’s announcement turned into a rationale for Discovery’s clip-oriented internet strategy as explained by CEO David Zaslav in the FT: “We have opted not to put a lot of our content on to the web. There is not a very strong economic model, number one, and, number two, from a viewership perspective, despite how aggressively others have gone on to the web, the take-up rate is not that strong.” Broadcasters have more leeway; cable nets need ad support to justify putting full-length shows online.

Jack Bauer: The Half-Million-Dollar Man
Two-Hour ‘24′ Movie Fetches Highest Price of Fall Season

GM launches radio campaign.
General Motors says radio ads begin today promoting their financing options. GM isn’t releasing the size of the “Financing That Fits” radio campaign, although it’s cash that has been added to its marketing budget.

The Train Is Coming. And With It, More Ads.
New York’s transit system is planning to convert much of its real estate into advertising space, including turnstiles, walls and subway tunnels.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

DISTURBING MUSIC RAP VIDEO (by Lynette Long)
I have thought long and hard about posting this video becaus