The Kicker

You know all the work and all the worrying and all the strategy and all the tragedy and all the sturm and all the drang and all the sound and all the fury that have, together, comprised the epic Campaign of 2008? Well. All the diffuse drama will itself diffuse, on November 4, into some […]

From the blessedly staid souls who brought you last month’s blessedly staid Convention Hubs–online coverage of the DNC and GOP conventions–comes a new feature: Debate Hub. Yep, C-SPAN is at it again! Detailed, sober, generally gimmick-free coverage of our upcoming national mud-wresting matches political slap-fests presidential and vice presidential debates! Per the press release, Debate […]

Looks like Al Gore, whose global reach encompasses the Nobel Foundation, hipster television, and, you know, the actual globe, will soon add one more territory to his empire. Portfolio‘s Jeff Bercovici reports that Gore will soon be buying a stake in Plenty, “a four-year-old title about environmentally-conscious living.” The former Veep’s exact stake–and exact role–in […]

It’s talking about Obama.

I missed the Todd Palin broadcast debut, but as Megan and Liz have pointed out, that’s no great loss. For a flavor of the interview (which didn’t include a single question on Sarah Palin’s questionable firing of the state’s public safety commissioner, an issue that, by all indications, Todd was well involved in) you could […]

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not about Sarah Palin. In their long ago Spring 2008 issue, The Kenyon Review published a lovely rumination on rejection letters. Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent […]

Ben Smith has posted the full pool report from Joe Biden’s visit yesterday to the Football Hall of Fame, written by Perry Bacon of the Washington Post. It’s a fun read, as it describes one of those moments where running for national office (and covering the person running) really seem fun. It’s almost a novella. […]

Katherine Seelye at The New York Times has a good piece up about the persistence of campaign lies, even after media and fact checking organizations have repeatedly debunked the claims. “But why, with all this fact checking, and with traditional news organizations increasingly emboldened to call out the candidates, do candidates repeat inaccuracies?” she asks. […]

Never use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent one will do…except, maybe, when laboring to describe what it is that cable pundits do. From the LA Times‘ James Rainey (while complaining about the quality of coverage of Candidates On Economic Crisis) : Armed with these scraps of near-news, horse-race junkies…then launched new rounds of soulless […]

He also likes "Everquest"

From an AP article exploring those negative cable news-bait campaign ads (the ones that don’t require an actual ad buy by the campaign, just an email to reporters): “It’s getting just silly that the ads they are putting out are represented as real spots,” said [Evan Tracey, head of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, […]

Watching Sean Hannity’s “no-topic-off-limits interview” with Sarah Palin right now. Nothing too tough or noteworthy so far. Lots of economy talk (Hannity: Is Obama using the Wall Street crisis for “political gain?” Palin doesn’t really take that bait… Palin says our country has an “OPM addiction”–“Other People’s Money”). Other questions: Will the Obama campain’s “attacks […]

That lunch at your desk in now an workplace norm is one thing. But, “treadmill desks”? Can the toilet-in-a-desk-chair (ergonimically correct, one hopes) be far behind? UPDATE: For CJR reader Kevin who politely requested a media angle to the above: If you go to the walk-working social networking site cited in this article, you see […]

Horrific. And hilarious.

A marriage of convenience, not one of passion