Hannity’s playing six-degrees-of-separation between Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan.

… following up on a post below — maybe email is a strange, unfamiliar technology to the network types.

John King seems not to have had much experience with it.

This is one of those situations where less would definitely have been more, or at least, better.

Rudy finishes sixth in Michigan, behind Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, and barely ahead of Uncommitted.

Of course, he’s faced challenges before, like on the morning of nine-eleven nine-eleven nine-eleven …

– The candidates obviously negotiated some sort of detente in the wake of this week’s race and gender controversies. They took some swipes at each other, but the overall tone was quite positive, and it reflected well on them.

– Tim Russert’s entire shtick consists of “gotcha!” He seemed to spend the entire evening trying to trip the candidates up in one minor inconsistency or another. “In old photographs, you appear to be younger — but now you are clearly older! Explain THAT!”

– The entire first segment of the debate was utterly issue-free, entirely about horse-race issues, Hillary crying, Obama being black, that sort of thing. Russert and Williams should really be ashamed of their priorities; it was as if they set out determined to prove the worst blogosphere stereotypes about them true.

– It’s well and good to blame the current economic meltdown on the Bush administration’s deliberate lack of regulatory oversight, but we shouldn’t forget that it was Hillary Clinton’s husband who pushed the repeal of Glass Steagall, which made the current mess possible.

– Obama says that if we could solve the problem of nuclear waste storage, then we should build more nuclear plants. Great, and if we can teach pigs to fly, we should all lie back on a pleasant patch of grass and enjoy their delightful aerial antics.

– At what point will the networks understand that email is no longer an exciting new technology, but rather just another mundane fact of life? It’s not as bad as the You Tube snowman, but it seems somewhat silly to have someone standing in front of a laptop reading off an occasional “email question,” as if three or four of these over the course of the evening somehow constitute a groundbreaking application of exciting new interactive technologies.

– For all the nitpicking one can (and will) do, it’s nice to see relatively rational people vying for leadership, in contrast to the travelling freak shows that are the Republican debates. Not to mention being able to string a succession of words together into coherent sentences, unlike the current occupant of the Oval Office (who even the R’s are doing their best to erase from collective memory, hence their frequent invocations of a President who left office twenty years ago.)

… also, meant to mention: totally lame to exclude Kucinich. At this point, anyone still in the running should be part of the discussion. I don’t need Tim Russert deciding whose voice I should and should not be listening to.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The chief of the U.S. military said Sunday he favors closing the prison here as soon as possible because he believes negative publicity worldwide about treatment of terrorist suspects has been “pretty damaging” to the image of the United States.

“I’d like to see it shut down,” Adm. Mike Mullen said in an interview with three reporters who toured the detention center with him on his first visit since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last October.

His visit came two days after the sixth anniversary of the prison’s opening in January 2002. He stressed that a closure decision was not his to make and that he understands there are numerous complex legal questions the administration believes would have to be settled first, such as where to move prisoners.

The rest.

Some BBC show on the radio earlier had a rundown of the songs various candidates are playing at their rallies. Hillary Clinton has switched from Celine Deon to Tom Petty’s “An American Girl,” while Barack Obama is playing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” And then there’s John Edwards, who’s evidently been playing Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” quite possibly one of the saddest songs ever written. I understand that thematically it’s in keeping with the message of his campaign, but still:

I got a job working construction
For the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain’t been much work
On account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember
and Mary acts like she don’t care

But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse, that sends me

Down to the river
Though I know the river is dry
That sends me down to the river tonight

Man, I’ll bet they’re just dancing in the aisles at the Edwards rally after that one plays. At least he didn’t choose “Atlantic City.”

The Times’ Public Editor tackles the Kristol Kontroversy:

The choice of Safire, who retired in 2005, set off a storm of protest. “The Times could have saved themselves about 50 grand a year if they just sent an office boy over to the White House to pick up the press releases,” fumed Nicholas von Hoffman of The Washington Post. Kristol’s appointment has not fared any better. “Pretty much the worst idea ever,” grumped Gawker, the New York media gossip Web site.

Of the nearly 700 messages I have received since Kristol’s selection was announced — more than half of them before he ever wrote a word for The Times — exactly one praised the choice.

Rosenthal’s mail has been particularly rough. “That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

What, indeed? Mercy me, such vile language (and bad spelling!) in the one email out of seven hundred he has chosen to reprint! Somebody fetch the smelling salts!

And then there’s this:

Rosenthal said: “Some people have said we shouldn’t have hired him because he supports the war in Iraq. That’s absurd.”

Er, no. That’s maybe what Rosenthal is hearing — what people are actually saying is that he shouldn’t have been hired because he has been wrong on everything over the course of this war, not to mention the fact that he is an operator first and a commentator second, and his commentary is frequently and deliberately dishonest and misleading in the service of his objectives. If it became necessary to start drafting six year olds to maintain the occupation of Iraq, Bill Kristol would be first in line arguing that six year olds are really much more mature than anyone realizes, and that the experience would be a completely beneficial one for them.

Toward the end, at least, Hoyt does at least acknowledge that this is an odd reward for someone who has absolutely no respect for the First Amendment:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists.

Publication of the article was controversial — my predecessor as public editor first supported it and then changed his mind — but Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

To put it mildly.

The other night while watching a CNN report on Ron Paul’s racist newsletter, my wife made a good observation. If you give Ron Paul the benefit of the doubt that the written-in-the-first-person and published-under-his-name racist ranting that (among many other things) refers to African-Americans as “animals” were written by other people…then is this really the kinda guy who should be President? If Ron Paul is so irresponsible that he let his quaint little newsletter “accidentally” turn into vile, right-wing extremist rag, then what does that say about how competent he’d be in overseeing something as large and complex as the executive branch of the federal government? The guy can’t even keep hate speech out of his photocopied little mailing list. On top of that, if Ron Paul turned his newsletter over to the kind of people who would write this shit, then what kinda neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists can we expect to see in a Ron Paul administration?

Once again, this is all assuming that you believe Ron Paul’s story, which I don’t.

I particularly enjoy the excruciating stupidity of the American media when it strikes its “deep expertise” pose. I’ve been reading up on astronomy, they say, and I wonder how, as president, you’d deal with the way the sun orbits around the earth.

For instance, here’s Charlie Gibson, moderating the recent Democratic debate in New Hampshire:

CHARLIE GIBSON: I want to go to another question. And it really is the central one in my mind in nuclear terrorism. The next president of the United States may have to deal with a nuclear attack on an American city. I’ve read a lot about this in recent days. The best nuclear experts in the world say there’s a 30 percent chance in the next 10 years.

One thing Gibson didn’t do when he “read a lot about this” was TO READ ANYTHING. If you feel like reading the study he’s referring to yourself (pdf), you’ll find that:

1. The question wasn’t whether there would be nuclear terrorism in a U.S. city. Rather, it was “In your opinion, what is the probability (expressed as a percentage) of an attack involving a nuclear explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the next 10 years?” I.e., they were asked about the use of nuclear weapons anywhere by anyone, including by governments or outside the US or both.

2. The mean response was 29.2%. However, the median was lower, at 20%.

3. Among the 85 “best nuclear experts in the world” surveyed was Robert Joseph, a notorious hardliner who was on the National Security Council for four years before replacing John Bolton as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Joseph supervised the section on Iraq’s WMD in the 2003 State of the Union, and was responsible for the uranium-from-Africa claim.

Others inhabit the Bush administration’s Dr. Strangelove-flavored penumbra. There’s Richard Allen, who’s on the Defense Advisory Board; Frank Carlucci, of the Carlyle Group and Project for a New American Century; and James Woolsey, Patrick Clawson, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Fred Ikle, all well-known for their role with PNAC and similar places.

GIBSON: Really, the central question in my mind is feet. I’ve been reading a lot about feet in recent days. And the best experts in the world say people each have nine feet. What would you do about this as president?

AND: On the same general subject, Sam Husseini makes a much more important point.

Democrats are actually in turmoil because they are terrified that their candidate will be a black or a woman, and they believe that racist and sexist Republicans will launch racist and/or sexist attacks accordingly, but you see the real closet racists and sexists are the Democrats themselves. Oh, and also, Hillary Clinton stole the election last night, with dead people voting and bribery and stuff.

…it’s like August says. From a policy perspective, she’s not my first choice, or second, or to be honest even third. But part of me would love to see her win, purely out of spite, just to drive the rightwing nutjobs insane.

From DownWithTyranny:

It appears that Senator Obama is striking a chord with his appeal to “post-partisanship.” Who wouldn’t like to see an end to the vicious, violent partisanship of our times? (I’ll tell you who: the ignorance-worshipping sociopaths of the Far-to-the-Nth-Degree Right who created that violent partisanship–utterly deliberately, I believe, for the express purpose of taking over the government and imposing their wingnut sociopathology on the rest of the country. Which come to think of it, they’ve done.)

It sounds lovely. Who doesn’t like to feel good? My problem with most “feel good” movements is that they aren’t based on anything real to feel good about.

It’s hard to see how Senator Obama’s stratospheric soar above partisanship can work. It’s based on the assumption that the reason we haven’t all gotten together and worked all this stuff out together in a spirit of harmony is because nobody ever thought of it. Does anyone really believe this?

Apparently so. But while there are certainly narrow issues–important ones, but narrow ones–where such compromises might be thrashed out in a dialogue unpolluted by the demagoguery of the Far Right, there aren’t all that many such issues, and hardly any of the really crucial issues qualify.

More here. And a related cartoon here.