2008 Presidential

An August 4 Time magazine article by Michael Grunwald comes to Sen. Barack Obama’s defense against Republican claims that his energy policy of keeping tires properly inflated is a joke. The article, entitled "The Tire-Gauge Solution: No Joke," argues that if everyone were to keep their tires properly inflated and keep up with regular auto maintenance, demand for gasoline would immediately be…

Somebody call the Epidemiology Branch at the NIH.  It's looking as if we're on the verge of a full-fledged epidemic of Obamania.  As we noted here, NYT columnist Bob Herbert suffered an acute bout of the malady on live national TV yesterday, seeing visions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument where none existed in the McCain  Obama/Spears/Hilton ad. By yesterday evening, Keith…

Influenced by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's recent claims on MSNBC's Morning Joe that the McCain campaign deliberately included "phallic symbols" along with images of attractive young white women in an ad attacking Barack Obama to exploit racial resentment, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann latched onto this theory on Monday's Countdown show and observed that the ad featured "two underdressed…

When Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times since 1993, recently charged in his column that the Republican Party deliberately targets black Democrats using ads featuring attractive white women to exploit racial resentment, and claimed as proof that the GOP does not run such ads against opponents who are white, the liberal columnist could have disproved this thesis by consulting a 1994…

It appears that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has dumped his appearances on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Host Olbermann issued a DailyKos diary explaining the dust up on Monday, August 4. According to Olbermann, the problem came in when Milbank violated Keith Olbermann's well-known journalistic standards. Of course, I jest about that... not that there was a disagreement but…

The L.A.Times's Andrew Malcolm is so over come by Obamamania that he sees connections to his messiah everywhere, even in hospitals separated by hundreds of miles, from patients admitted days apart, with maladies and injuries that are completely dissimilar. And not just with ordinary everyday patients in those hospitals, but with two star studded actors who ended up in hospitals, one in Chicago…

An Associated Press article printed in the Denver Post covers a recent concern of increased prostitution at political conventions from predominantly one angle - the Republican angle. The travesty of media justice starts with the screaming headline: Groups Predict Prostitution Spike at RNC Odd that the Denver Post would print such an article, without noting that the source…

On Monday’s "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith highlighted Barack Obama’s birthday, but wondered: "So is he feeling older faster as a result of the campaign trail?" Correspondent Bianca Solorzano later reported on Obama turing 47 and having endured a long campaign: "Barack Obama has been campaigning for president for 18 months...It was just four years ago that the relatively unknown Illinois…

The Obama campaign appears to have come up with a neat way to deflect criticism of the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee's failure to visit wounded American troops while visiting Germany last month: have wife Michelle sponsor a meeting with military families.As CNN.com reported Monday (emphasis added): "Days after a television spot from John McCain’s campaign suggested Barack Obama did…

Care to Revise and Extend Your Remarks, Sen. Obama?Editor's Note: Update below the fold.The uproar of the media, serving as adjunct PR firms in defense of their beloved Sen. Barack Obama in response to Sen. John McCain's video comparing the Illinois Senator to Paris Hilton, was deafening. The ad was described as "nasty," "childish" and "juvenile," a "strange" "nuclear attack" for having dared to…

Warning: excessive adulation of Barack Obama is harmful to the vision and can in extreme cases cause hallucinations. We're all familiar with how an Obamania overdose produced strange tingling sensations in Chris Matthews.  A new, virulent strain of the affliction has now emerged, claiming its first victim in the person of Bob Herbert, who on live national TV saw visions of the Leaning Tower of…

Newsweek Paris bureau chief Christopher Dickey appeared as a guest on the August 4 edition of MSNBC’s “News Live” to discuss a recent trip through the South he took in order to determine “if Obama's candidacy was helping to pull people in the South together, freeing them of their histories, or pushing them apart.” During their discussion, the two journalists disparaged white Southerners who…

On Monday's "Good Morning America," weekend host Kate Snow interviewed Bill Clinton in Rwanda and at one point told him he didn't have to answer a quasi-tough question. Towards the end of her interview, she prefaced this query by almost apologizing: "Pretty simple question. And maybe you don't want to answer it right now and I respect that fully. But, if you want to answer it, do you personally…

In her August 4 blog post -- "Energy fueling Monday's agenda. Obama, 47 today, acts, McCain reacts" -- Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet glossed over a ludicrous statement by Sen. Barack Obama wherein the presumptive Democratic nominee suggested that properly inflating tires would eliminate the need to drill for more domestic oil.Sweet noted that Republicans are : [P]laying…