The Kicker

NYT blogger Judith Warner has a great post up today: a description of her experiences communing with other mothers at a McCain/Palin rally in Virginia. Warner had expected, she writes, to be amused by the spectacle of red-garbed Palin Moms—”I figured funny things were bound to befall us in Palin-Land”—but, instead, she found herself moved […]

The Observer’s John Kolbin has a funny rundown of an internal rah-rah meeting hosted by Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for employees of The New York Times. Take this exchange: A man asked, very directly, why the Company doesn’t sell its regional newspapers? It seemed to catch [Sulzberger] off guard. “Here, meet my family,” he said, by […]

Before he was Michael Scott and Andy Stitzer, Steve Carell was a Daily Show “political correspondent.” Well, the HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar has unearthed a classic and brilliant clip, from John McCain’s prior White House run, in which Carell interviews The Maverick aboard the Straight Talk Express. Hilarity, unsurprisingly, ensues. Sklar has also found a New […]

The Times summarized Charlie Gibson’s role in last night’s Round 1 of the Sarah Palin interview thusly: “The interview was hardly gentle, as Mr. Gibson pressed Ms. Palin for direct answers to some of the complicated foreign policy and national security issues facing the next administration.” Now, here’s Howard Kurtz: “Anyone who said that Charlie […]

Are you ready for a three day IV drip of Palin interviews? In this early excerpt on ABC’s website, Charlie Gibson asks Palin to get specific on what admitting Georgia into NATO would mean, beyond bluster. The Governor advocated the accession of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. When asked by Gibson if under the NATO […]

John Edwards’s affair. Bristol Palin’s baby. They tempt one to believe that the only moral consistency to be found in politics is hypocrisy, and same goes for the way each was covered. On the WSJ’s Op-Ed page today, David Perel, Editor in Chief of the National Enquirer, retells the oft-told story about the mainstream media’s […]

Quick: What’s the connection between the presidential election and yesterday’s guilty pleas by con-man Raffaello Follieri (a.k.a. Anne Hathaway’s ex), besides that they’re both easy cable news fodder. Well, The Nation has done the journalistic spade work, and finds that McCain and Rick Davis, his lobbyist-turned campaign manager, spent part of the senator’s 70th birthday […]

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut round up Joe Biden and the Palins’ Secret Service code names. Absolute Dowd bait. Joe = Celtic Sarah = Denali Todd = Driller No word on Jill’s, but hey, when was the last time there was any word on Jill?

MediaBistro brings us the news that Len Downie, who famously abstained from voting while he served as executive editor of The Washington Post, registered with the D.C. Board of Elections the very day he stepped down. Now, Len, it’s on to the important matter of developing opinions on political issues.

On MSNBC this morning: JOE SCARBOROUGH: Barack Obama’s biggest mistake in the campaign thus far may have been the fact he waited a month to call Bill Clinton when his advisers were begging him to …I do not understand. I didn’t understand in 2004 why John Kerry didn’t pick up the phone every day. If […]

As Michael Kinsley

Last night, it was with a certain sheepishness that Anderson Cooper kicked off AC360 with, natch, talk of ‘PigGate: COOPER: The media has fixed on the [lipstick/pig] controversy. No doubt about that. Tonight we will not. Yes, lipstick will be mentioned. So will pigs. But so will taxes and spending and everything else that taxpayers […]

Without further comment, the lede of Begala’s HuffPo article about McCain, Palin, the truth, the media, and the relationship between the four of them: If John McCain and Sarah Palin were to say the moon was made of green cheese, we can be certain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would pounce on it, and […]

What else? What more can we do with LipStickOnAPigGate? Talk about it. Have dueling surrogates on our channel to talk about it. Interview each other talking about it. Point to how others in the media have talked about it. Done. Done. Done. And, done. What else? Come on! There must be something we’ve forgotten?! If […]

To the pantheon of experts who have weighed in on the election, welcome Corey Ehmke, a web developer, who mined the code behind Obama’s and McCain’s websites and mused about what it all meant. While his vote will clearly go to Obama come November, his reasoning is quite amusing. Here’s an inference about preparedness based […]