Not being evil

One more reason to use Google: a religious-right activist says the godly should refuse to use it because the company opposes a proposed constitutional amendment in California that would ban same-sex marriage.

Good to see that Google is living up to its informal corporate motto — "Don't Be Evil."

Alan Lupo, 70

Alan Lupo, a legendary local journalist who worked for the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald, has died. Bryan Marquard's obit has been posted on the Globe's Web site.

Lupo and his wife, Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers, have been fixtures on the Boston scene for many years. I didn't know either of them well, but in my limited dealings with them they struck me as unusually good and decent people. I've never heard anyone say otherwise.

The last time I spoke with Lupo was a couple of years ago. He'd retired from the Globe and was writing an occasional column for the Salem News. I mentioned it to him, and he was delighted, telling me how much fun he was having practicing journalism at the community level.

I believe that this is the online interview Marquard refers to in which Lupo and Rivers talk about meeting while making a documentary about rats. The interview, by Henry Dane, was to publicize an appearance they made in 2005 at the Winthrop Public Library. One of Lupo's quotes could serve as his epitaph:

We've always been interested in helping people redress their grievances. Being in journalism, you've got access to power. It may be the board of selectmen, it may be the governor, it may be somebody in the private sector. And if people are upset or angry for good reason ... because their airport's expanding or they're putting highways through your backyard or there's oil tanks and you don't want 'em in your neighborhood … you've got a responsibility to cover those stories.

Lupo's death is a loss for Boston and for journalism.

More: "There's a lot to be said about Alan Lupo. All of it good. Much of it colorful as hell," writes Clif Garboden at ThePhoenix.com. And what Garboden's got to say is worth reading.

Photo of Alan Lupo and Caryl Rivers is online at the Web site of the Friends of the Winthrop Public Library and Museum.

A nasty, brutish and short postseason? (II)

The Red Sox confirm that Josh Beckett has a strained oblique, and announce that he's been pushed back to Game 3. That sounds pretty mild for an oblique injury, although the team concedes it could take Beckett longer than that.

On second thought, though, I like Lester and Matsuzaka in the first two games, as long as the bullpen's ready to take over in the sixth for Daisuke's start. By all rights, the Angels should win this — which means, as Bob Ryan notes, that there's not as much pressure on the Sox.

Kristol mails it in

Bill Kristol barely rouses himself in his New York Times column today. Simply as a student of opinion journalism, I'm amazed at the extent to which he's willing to make assertions without even trying to back them up.

Today's effort isn't a bad column because he's a conservative, but because he's so lazy. Here are three examples:

1. "McCain's impetuous decision to return to Washington was right. The agreement announced early Sunday morning is better than Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's original proposal, and better than the deal the Democrats claimed was close on Thursday. Assuming the legislation passes soon, and assuming it reassures financial markets, McCain will be able to take some credit."

I have not seen one account of the negotiations that shows John McCain had anything to do with the outcome; I've seen quite a few that suggest his parachute jump was a distraction. I make that point not to claim that I'm right, but to explain the conventional wisdom that Kristol, as McCain's advocate, needs to puncture.

As if. Here was Kristol's golden opportunity to work those inside connections and tell us why everyone is wrong; to say that McCain did X and Y, and that it's time he got some credit, damn it. Kristol doesn't even try.

2. "McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice."

As we have all seen, Sarah Palin can't answer simple questions about any issues of national and international importance. The reason McCain's aides have been so parsimonious about her public appearances is that she stumbles every time she opens her mouth. We wouldn't be talking about how she's being handled if she could answer the questions.

Again, the columnist's job is to tell us why everyone is wrong — to explain, on the basis of evidence, that the reason her interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric were so damaging was because McCain's handlers have gotten inside her head and made it impossible for her natural wisdom to flow forth. Or whatever. In other words, give us some plausible explanation for us not to believe our own lying eyes and ears.

And again, Kristol doesn't bother.

3. "On Saturday, Obama criticized McCain for never using in the debate Friday night the words 'middle class.' ... The McCain campaign might consider responding by calling attention to Chapter 14 of Obama’s eloquent memoir, 'Dreams From My Father.' There Obama quotes from the brochure of Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright's church — a passage entitled 'A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"

Why, yes, the McCain campaign might very well consider doing that. Would it be a good idea? Who knows? Kristol doesn't make any attempt to try to characterize what the brochure says.

Wright has indulged in some pretty nasty rhetoric. But he is, after all, a minister. If Wright calls on people to disavow "the pursuit of middleclassness," might he be urging them to eschew materialism in favor of service to one's fellow men and women? Who knows? What we do know is that, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, Kristol manages to insinuate that Wright was seeking a race war against bourgeois society.

How much is he getting paid for this?

McCain and Middleborough

I'll leave it to others — Gladys Kravitz, perhaps? — to ponder the deeper meaning of this. But it looks like those of us who are trying to stop a gambling casino from being built in Middleborough have one more thing to worry about if John McCain is elected president.

A nasty, brutish and short postseason?

I didn't like the Red Sox' chances even before the latest news — just too many key guys hurt. I'm amazed they made the playoffs with such ease, given that it seemed like they never really got hot all season. (Although they've had a terrific won-loss record since The Trade.)

Now Steve Buckley of the Boston Herald reports that Josh Beckett might be out with an oblique injury. I don't want to say stick a fork in them. But you might as well keep one handy. (Via Universal Hub.)

Whose privacy is being protected?

Over at the New England First Amendment Center's blog, I've got a post on an interesting case involving the town of Nantucket. It seems that local officials wanted to keep a severance agreement under wraps — in order, they said, to protect the privacy of an employee they'd fired.

The local weekly, the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, filed a complaint, and last week the state ruled that the agreement must be made public.

As it turns out, the ex-employee was only too happy to tell her story. And, as is often the case, when government officials invoke privacy, what they're really trying to do is avoid embarrassment for themselves.

The media debate the debate

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that though McCain and Obama may have debated to a draw on substance, media reaction suggests that McCain's grumpy, condescending demeanor may have given the edge to Obama.

Live-blogging tonight's debate

10:37 p.m. Basically a tie. McCain reminds us that he's no Bush, who could barely make it through any of these things. Obama, as the new guy, ought to get the biggest boost for showing he can go toe-to-toe with McCain. But low expectations probably translate into this being considered a good night for McCain. And good night from Media Nation.

10:23 p.m. McCain's best stretch of the night — a historical and contemporary disquisition on Russia and its neighbors. More sabre-rattling, but assures us that we're not returning to the Cold War. Obama agrees with McCain — no doubt too dicey to take on the issue of Georgian aggression in a sound-bite setting.

10:17 p.m. Obama's telling the truth about Kissinger and Iran. McCain isn't.

10:12 p.m. Obama's best stretch of the night. Says he'll meet with anyone if it will enhance U.S. security. Notes that McCain adviser Henry Kissinger says we should meet with Iran "without preconditions." And observes that North Korea went wild on nuke buildup after we cut off ties.

10:09 p.m. McCain: Obama wants to sit down with Ahmadinejad and "legitimize" a regime that wants to destroy Israel. Says he'll sit down with anyone, but not without "preconditions."

10:08 p.m. Sabre-rattling on Iran. McCain sounds like he's ready to go to war tomorrow. Obama wants "tough, direct diplomacy." "This notion that by not talking to people, we're punishing them has not worked."

10:02 p.m. McCain is too maudlin and long-winded about his bracelet. Obama barely mentions his, and seems petulant. Don't either of these guys know how to get the symbolism right?

10 p.m. My bracelet's better than yours.

9:56 p.m. Globe-trotting one-upmanship. Obama: I've talked to President Karzai. McCain: I've been to Waziristan.

9:49 p.m. Obama shifts the turf from Iraq to Afghanistan, and seems more comfortable in so doing. Put more troops into Afghanistan to "capture and kill bin Laden and crush Al Qaeda."

9:44 p.m. The war versus the surge. McCain says Obama was wrong about the surge. Obama says McCain was wrong about the war. McCain says the next president won't have to decide whether to go to war in Iraq. But the next president could decide to go to war somewhere else, couldn't he? "Sen. Obama refuses to acknowledge that we're winning the war in Iraq." "That's not true. That's not true."

9:36 p.m. Obama's warming up.

9:34 p.m. Think of it as a job interview. Obama comes across as cool, competent and a little bloodless. McCain? Passionate, experienced but unpredictable. Whom would you hire?

9:29 p.m. Switching from CNN to C-SPAN so I don't have to look at the stupid audience-reaction meter.

9:27 p.m. McCain's showing his less attractive side. Accuses Obama of wanting to raise taxes on everyone making more than $42,000 ("Not true," replies Obama), and then snickers the way he used to snicker at Romney.

9:21 p.m. Does it seem to anyone else that McCain has been talking about three times as much as Obama?

9:18 p.m. McCain is talking about simple, understandable themes. I can barely understand Obama, and I'm addicted to this stuff.

9:12 p.m. Obama is talking ideas. McCain is talking values. Guess which is more effective?

9:10 p.m. Jim Lehrer wants to know if Obama and McCain are going to vote for the bailout plan. But there is no plan yet.

I'm not a huge fan of live-blogging events, but I'm going to give it a try tonight. I'm hoping it will help me organize my thoughts as I get ready to round up media commentary on the debate for the Guardian tomorrow morning.

Libel insurance for bloggers

Blogging can be a legally hazardous activity, especially if you are doing it independently. If a staff reporter for an established news organization is sued for libel, he or she is in for an exceedingly unpleasant experience — but at least the employer and its insurance company will pay to fight the charges or settle.

Last year I attended a conference at which the subject of bloggers and liability came up, and let's just say that it was chilling, in all senses of the word. Right now Cape Cod Today blogger Peter Robbins is facing a libel suit. What too many bloggers fail to understand is that they are not exempt from libel laws. They just lack the means to fight back.

That's why a new project by the Media Bloggers Association is so interesting. MBA president Robert Cox (in photo) has come up with a new program under which bloggers who take an online course in media law will be eligible to purchase libel insurance.

It's not cheap — David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project, who helped write the online course, says that it will cost a minimum of $450 a year. A prominent local blogger who's been corresponding with me about this looked into it and was told that, in his case, it might be almost twice that. But it's a lot cheaper than losing your home, which is what many bloggers are unwittingly risking.

Cox is a longtime leader in legal issues facing the blogging community, and he deserves a lot of credit for bringing this program to fruition.

Photo (cc) by J.D. Lasica and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Try not to laugh

From today's New York Times story on $6.6 billion in federal earmarks that Congress is moving toward approving:

Senator [Ted] Stevens got $2 million for the University of Alaska to study "hibernation genomics."

Martha A. Stewart, director of federal relations for the university, said scientists were studying the hibernation of Alaskan ground squirrels and black bears. If medics could induce a state of hibernation in humans, she said, they might be able to increase the survival chances of wounded troops being evacuated from the battlefield.

Wouldn't it be better if she'd just said scientists want to study hibernation, and Stevens got the money?

Beating the press

I'll be on "Beat the Press" (WGBH-TV, Channel 2) today at 7 p.m. We'll be talking about John McCain versus the New York Times, Sarah Palin and the media, and the debut of the New England First Amendment Center at Northeastern University.

A weird, sad tale comes to an end

At least one chapter in the weird, sad tale of Tania deLuzuriaga has come to an end, as she has resigned from the Boston Globe. As you may know, deLuzuriaga was recently found to have exchanged inappropriate e-mails of a sexual nature with a high-ranking school official when she was a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Journalists know they can't secretly carry on an affair with people they cover. At the Miami New Times, Kyle Munzenrieder reminds us of the great Abe Rosenthal rule: "You can fuck an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can't cover the circus." DeLuzuriaga's ethical breach was a serious one.

But to the extent that some people at the Globe agitated for her to leave, as Christine McConville reported in the Boston Herald last week, I think her situation raises an ethical question for management, too: Should wrongdoing in a previous job be held against someone if she is performing competently and without incident in her current job?

I've done no independent reporting on this, and there may well be issues about which I'm not aware. But assuming deLuzuriaga kept her personal and professional lives separate while she was at the Globe, it strikes me that that should have been good enough.

Gender hypocrisy raises its ugly head, too. As Amy Derjue notes at Boston Daily, and Rick Sawyer observes at Bostonist, deLuzuriaga's erstwhile and extremely married alleged paramour not only has paid no penalty, he just got a promotion. Nice.

What to look for tomorrow

Assuming McCain shows up, that is.

My Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading expert on presidential debates, writes in the Politico about what McCain and Obama need to accomplish tomorrow night.

Schroeder's bottom line: McCain is better than Obama in conversational settings, but he's been inconsistent this year; and Obama is better than McCain at giving a speech, but has rarely showed the ability to seize the moment in unscripted settings.

Neither, he says, is a master of the debate form on the order of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Schroeder's latest addition to the pantheon — Hillary Clinton.

No help for their candidate

Maybe I'm reading to much into this. But if congressional Republicans wanted to help John McCain, wouldn't they have slowed things down and tried to make it look like McCain's parachute drop onto Capitol Hill was — well, if not exactly crucial, then at least helpful?

Instead, Republicans and Democrats have reportedly just about wrapped up the bailout legislation, leaving McCain looking foolish, and with nothing better to do Friday evening than to head to Mississippi for the first presidential debate.

Here's a hilarious tidbit from the Politico:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said that "nobody mentioned McCain" during the several-hour-long meeting on the $700 billion market rescue plan, other than Frank. "They winced when I did," said Frank. He went on to compare Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to "Andy Kaufman and his Mighty Mouse: Here I am to save the day."

I am amazed at how unsteady McCain's behavior is compared to eight years ago — or, for that matter, eight months ago.

Time out on OT

The Boston Globe keeps adding to its roster of niche publications, which is smart. It plans to charge 50 cents for its new sports weekly, OT, which may not be so smart.

I could see something like OT being a howling success with advertisers if it were freely available. But I'm not sure people are going to lay out money for sports news that is not substantially different from what's on the Web — even if OT is better written and more insightful, which it may well be with the likes of Charlie Pierce and Tony Massarotti writing for it.

We'll see.

Wilkerson run would break no rules

Few observers of local politics are as astute as Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. But I can't agree with her that state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, D-Roxbury, is somehow breaking the rules because she will try to keep her seat with a write-in campaign if she doesn't win the Democratic primary recount.

(Aside: I am referring only to the rules of running an independent campaign. I am not referring to the numerous tax and campaign-finance rules Wilkerson has broken over the years, which are the reason her political career may now be going down the drain.)

Wilkerson's challenger, Sonia Chang-Díaz, may be the Democratic nominee (pending the recount results), but the rules allow Wilkerson to run as an independent, even though her name won't appear on the ballot.

And though Wilkerson won't be the party's nominee, there is nothing to stop her from calling herself a Democrat (which seems to offend Vennochi), or a radical syndicalist, or Irene.

Vennochi tries to draw an unfavorable comparison between Wilkerson and U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who was re-elected as an independent after he lost a Democratic primary race in 2006. Lieberman, Vennochi writes, had the "grace" to run "as a third-party candidate."

But Lieberman took the same branding approach as Wilkerson, referring to himself as an "Independent Democrat," which sounds like a Democrat, only better:

I remain a Democratic [sic] but I'm running as an Independent Democrat, which in some ways makes official what I’ve been for a long time. I've been an independent Democratic [sic]. [Note: I haven't listened to the audio, but I assume those are transcription errors, not evidence that Lieberman can't talk.]

Wilkerson's free to run, and the voters are free to re-elect her or reject her. Those are the rules.

An offer Obama has to refuse

Let's assume, for a moment, that there might actually be some substantive value to the presidential campaign being suspended so that John McCain and Barack Obama can lock themselves in a room until the financial crisis has been solved. How might it have been handled if McCain weren't being entirely political?

Here's an answer: McCain could have approached Obama quietly. If Obama agreed, they could make a joint announcement. If not, then McCain could go public and grab whatever political advantage was to be had.

So what actually happened? As best as we can tell, McCain announced publicly and unilaterally that he was going to suspend his campaign, blindsiding Obama — after spurning agreeing to Obama's private request to issue a joint statement earlier today. Obama can't go along, because he'd look weak and subservient. McCain knows that, which is why he made Obama an offer he has to refuse.

It's a big gamble. McCain might end up looking ridiculous. His hope is that Obama will look crassly political instead.

On the merits, the whole thing strikes me as absurd. The White House and Congress are working on a bailout package that everyone involved seems to think will get done within days.

Friday's scheduled presidential debate is not a sporting event that should be canceled on the grounds of misplaced priorities. It's serious business, the business of democracy. Let's get on with it.

Explaining an unexplained dip

The New York Times' Steve Lohr today writes about the growing furor over executive pay, and the widening disparity between what top company officials make as compared to average workers.

But the story is accompanied by a chart, based on statistics from the Economic Policy Institute, that shows a huge dip in the disparity earlier in this decade. Today, according to the chart, the disparity is rising once again, though it has not yet reached the heights of 2000.

Nowhere in Lohr's story is the blip explained. (Not that I'm blaming him — he probably had no idea that particular chart would be used to accompany his reporting.)

What's the explanation? According to an Economic Policy Institute report from June 21, 2006:

The ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000. The fall in the stock market reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., options) causing CEO pay to moderate to 143 times that of an average worker in 2002. Since then, however, CEO pay has exploded and by 2005 the average CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times that of an average worker ($41,861).

OK, I suppose we could have figured that out. But someone at the Times should have seen that the chart did not perfectly match Lohr's reporting that chief-executive compensation has risen from 35 times to 275 times that of the average worker since the 1970s. It's true, but stuff happened in between, too.

Congratulations, Red Sox

But should the dominant team of this decade be breaking out the champagne just for clinching the wild card? Seems a little cheesy.

George Will thrashes McCain

Conservative columnist George Will absolutely goes off on John McCain:

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people....

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

The proximate cause of Will's dismay is what he calls McCain's "fact-free slander" of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox.

These are very tough words coming from perhaps our best-known conservative pundit.

The Red Sox' first Latino superstar

In today's Boston Globe, Keith O'Brien writes about the diminishing number of Latino players on the Red Sox — and compares the current team to the all- or mostly white teams of the past.

Point taken. But O'Brien steps in it when he refers to a "team whose stars typically looked like Ted Williams or Carl Yastrzemski" in describing those mostly white line-ups. The problem here is that Williams, as many knowledgeable fans know, was only the greatest Latino star in baseball history.

Williams' mother, Micaela "May" Venzor, was the daughter of parents who were born in Mexico, Pablo Venzor and Natalia Hernández. In his 1969 autobiography, "My Turn at Bat," Williams, who himself was born and grew up in San Diego, writes of his mother:

Her maiden name was Venzor, and she was part Mexican and part French, and that's fate for you; if I had had my mother's name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.

May Venzor Williams was a volunteer for the Salvation Army, an avocation that kept her away from home most of the time, and about which her son complains bitterly in "My Turn at Bat."

O'Brien's mistake is not unusual. In 2005, the New York Times groused that Williams had been left off Major League Baseball's list of "Latino Legends." Williams' Latino background is not well-known. But that makes it no less real.

"The left's favorite conservative"

Good Howard Kurtz profile today of New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Though I often disagree with Brooks, I've always liked his work. So it was somewhat disconcerting to read that my admiration for Brooks borders on cliché: according to Kurtz, Brooks is "sometimes cast as the left's favorite conservative."

Fair enough. Brooks is, after all a moderate conservative whose views on cultural issues are a lot closer to mine than, say, to Mike Huckabee's.

I thought it took a while for Brooks to find his legs as a Times columnist. His longer pieces in the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Monthly were terrific. At the Times, though, the tyranny of having to write short and the pressure of being the token conservative seemed to lead him to write agit-prop that I doubted even he believed.

Brooks has long since found his voice, though, as evidenced by his nuanced, shifting view of Barack Obama. Of course, he may just be trying to keep his Obama-supporting wife and kids happy.

Photo (cc) by DoubleSpeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Those greedy low-income seniors

Some mighty odd rhetoric this morning from the McCain campaign, which falsely claims that Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on everyone earning more than $42,000 a year. Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish writes:

Democrat Barack Obama has proposed eliminating the federal income tax for senior citizens on income below $50,000, which his campaign says would mean that 7 million seniors would not pay the tax, with an average tax cut of $1,400....

McCain, meanwhile, has not proposed a tax cut specifically for seniors. "We haven't tried to target every demographic, the way Obama does with a handout, so we don't have that," McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said.

A "handout"? What is Holtz-Eakin saying? That tax cuts are just fine as long as they're not targeted to low-income senior citizens?

From the top of Mount Monadnock

I led a church group to the summit of Mount Monadnock yesterday, on what may have been the best hiking day of the 21st century. We took the Dublin Trail from the north. We weren't exactly alone, but it was a lot less crowded than the more popular trails up the south side of the peak.

This shot is from the summit, looking down on the Dublin Trail's final, rocky approach.

First Amendment Center at Northeastern

The Associated Press reports on the launch of the New England First Amendment Center, founded by the New England First Amendment Coalition, Northeastern's School of Journalism and the Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

Northeastern's coordinator, Walter Robinson, explains that the center will focus on ensuring access to public records, telling the AP: "Most of the people that reporters and citizens deal with who have the information — they are not up on the law — and if people understood the law better, if we had better public education on this, then we would have better compliance."

Adds Steve Burgard, director of the J-school: "We hope a center like this for many people will be place where they can go to learn what the law is and how they can use it."

The center's Web site includes a blog, to which I'll contribute occasionally.

Here is the official announcement.

Your own lying eyes

I'm going to break one of my rules for blogging by engaging in a little mind-reading. That's because it seems fairly obvious that the folks at the Washington Post have decided they don't want to engage in a battle with the McCain-Palin campaign over Sarah Palin's crystal-clear, public statement linking the war in Iraq to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

How else can we possibly explain Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's column accepting the line that Palin was actually referring to a terrorist group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq? How else can we understand reporter Anne Kornblut's contention that there was more than one interpretation that could be given to Palin's remarks? Why else would the Post run a "clarification" to Kornblut's article that might as well have been headed "obfuscation"?

By all means, watch the video above, but here's the key sentence from Palin's talk to Iraq-bound Alaskan soldiers, including her son Track: "You'll be there to defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans. You'll be there because America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before Sept. 11, 2001."

Is this difficult? There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not plan and carry out the attacks. Every one of the terrorists was either Saudi or Egyptian. I mean, come on. Palin's words were plainly spoken. There is no alternative interpretation.

The U.S. military, after extensive study, found there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The military also believes that Al Qaeda in Iraq is merely a homegrown, Iraqi insurgent movement.

Why is the Washington Post acting as enablers for the McCain-Palin campaign's transparent attempt to explain away Palin's ludicrous statement?

Beating the press

I'll be a panelist on "Beat the Press" tomorrow (WGBH-TV, Channel 2, 7 p.m.).

Sarah Palin and the Special Olympics

Several news organizations, including the New York Times and NPR, have reported that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin cut the state's Special Olympics budget by $275,000 earlier this year. That's accurate, but it's not the whole story, and I've posted an update to reflect that.

According to Newsbusters.org, and verified by state documents, the Special Olympics sought $550,000 for the coming fiscal year. Palin used her line-item veto to cut that in half, but it still represented an increase of $25,000.

Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard gets carried away, describing the $550,000 as merely a number that was "proposed." In fact, it was approved by the state's Republican-controlled legislature, so Palin really went out of her way to make this cut. The question: Why? Alaska's KTUU-TV tried to get someone from the Special Olympics to comment, but was unsuccessful.

What services would the extra money have paid for? Was it for new programs? Was it to make up for a loss of funding from other sources? What will be the effect of Palin's veto?

I'd say someone ought to find out. How about it, Anchorage Daily News?

Dark thoughts at the new OJR

The Online Journalism Review [link now fixed], which disappeared a few months ago, is back. Annenberg School director Geneva Overholser unveils the new OJR. Here's one difference: black type on a dark gray background. Hmm ...

Picking apart Jeff Jacoby's indictment

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby today takes on what he calls the "frenzy of rage and contempt set off by the nomination of Sarah Palin."

Because Jacoby's an important voice and deserves to be taken seriously, I'm going to take a little more space than I normally might to pick his column apart. As you will see, there is almost nothing in Jacoby's piece that holds up to scrutiny.

1. "There has been legitimate criticism, of course. But there has also been a gusher of slander, much of it — like the slur that she isn't the real mother of her infant son, Trig — despicable."

Agreed. It doesn't get much more despicable than that. But why bring it up? As we know, this rumor was nothing but the product of a pseudonymous hate-monger on Daily Kos. Until the McCain campaign itself cited it as a reason for going public with 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the only mainstream journalist who mentioned it was Andrew Sullivan, blogging for the Atlantic. I unloaded on him for that.

This complaint makes as much sense as blaming the media and mainstream Republicans for anonymous e-mails that claim Barack Obama is a Muslim.

2. "Voters have been told that she slashed funding in Alaska for special-needs children."

Perhaps that's because, this summer, she cut the budget for the Special Olympics by $275,000. [True, but see note below.]

3. "That she tried to ban books from Wasilla's public library."

Unproven, though Bill Adair, editor of the nonpartisan Web site PolitiFact, now says there may be more to this allegation than first appeared. The investigation continues.

4. "That she was a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party."

That was a case of media overreach based on some pretty tantalizing information. We know, for instance, that Palin's husband, Todd Palin, was a member for seven years; that she denies the testimony of several eyewitnesses who say she attended a state convention in the mid-1990s; and that, as governor, she recorded a cheery video message to be played at the party state convention.

Lest we forget, the words of party founder Joe Vogler remain emblazoned on the party's Web site: "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."

5. "That she links Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11."

She does, most recently last Thursday.

6. "That she backed Pat Buchanan for president."

The source of this error was an MSNBC analyst named, uh, Pat Buchanan. In Buchanan's defense, it's possible that the "Buchanan for President" button Palin was wearing fooled him.

7. "That she doesn't want students taught about contraception."

During her 2006 campaign for governor, Palin answered a questionnaire that dealt with sex education and a number of other issues.

Here is one of the questions: "Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?"

And here is Palin's answer: "Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support."

Does not abstinence-only education by definition exclude teaching kids about contraception? That's not a rhetorical question — I don't know. But I think it does. (Or not. See "Update," below.)

8. "That she called the war in Iraq 'a task from God.'"

I think Jacoby is right in calling this a stretch, though reasonable people — including a Pentacostal scholar — believe otherwise. But she did ask people to pray that a natural-gas pipeline would be built in Alaska. Is it somehow better to refer to a pipeline as a gift from God than it is to call the war in Iraq a task from God?

9. "For months they [the media] refused to mention the infidelity of John Edwards, yet they leaped with relish onto Bristol Palin's pregnancy."

What the media refused to do was pass along — or at least investigate and verify — stories in the National Enquirer about Edwards' infidelity. Now the media are ignoring stories in the Enquirer that Palin had an affair with an ex-business partner of her husband's, and that her two oldest kids have a thing for OxyContin and weed. Sounds pretty even-handed to me.

10. "Yet the more she has been attacked, the more her support has solidified. In the latest Fox News poll, Palin's favorable/unfavorable ratio is a strong 54-27."

Polls prove nothing. But for what it's worth, her favorability/unfavorability ratings are down 10 points in the past few days, according to Newsweek.

Jacoby also passes along some pretty nasty comments from the likes of Randi Rhodes and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. I'm not sure what that proves. We've also heard Obama referred to as "uppity," and recently a waffle mix featuring Obama as Uncle Jemimah was spotted at some sort of "values" conference.

The point is that Jacoby has gathered together essentially the entire indictment of the so-called liberal media with respect to Palin. And every bit of it is either wrong or distorted.

More: Sean Roche has similar thoughts at Blue Mass Group.

Update: Media Nation reader J.S. passes along this link, which shows that Palin does indeed believe contraception should be part of sex education. So yes, Jacoby is right about that. Not sure what Palin believed she was responding to when she also said she supported abstinence-only programs.

Thursday update: The NPR story on which I relied was imprecise. Palin did indeed slash the Special Olympics budget request by $275,000, but the program will still receive slightly more money than it did the year before. Thanks to Media Nation reader P.S.

The media's lost authority

The media have been clowning (to borrow a phrase from the Incomparable One) about our political figures for years. Now that they're starting to call John McCain on his dishonest campaign, they're shocked that no one takes them seriously anymore.

Eric Boehlert explains.

Patrick's star is rising

When a member of the Governor's Council wants your endorsement enough to fake it, then your reputation is definitely on the upswing.

Jeremy Jacobs reports at PolitickerMA that Kelly Timilty has sent out campaign literature featuring a fictitious endorsement by Gov. Deval Patrick, complete with his forged signature.

Congratulations, Governor. You've truly arrived.

Ditching the Straight Talk Express

Longtime John McCain admirer Richard Cohen has written a stunning column in the Washington Post about his disillusionment with the erstwhile conductor of the Straight Talk Express. (Via Talking Points Memo.) After excoriating McCain for his profligate lying, Cohen says:

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

This is remarkable stuff. I'm not sure we'll see a tougher indictment of McCain for the rest of the campaign.

Wall Street politics

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at how Barack Obama can take advantage of the Wall Street meltdown to seize the momentum back from John McCain.

Baked Alaskan

Friend of Media Nation Al Giordano has broken the news that Sarah Palin had a tanning bed installed in the Alaska governor's mansion shortly after she was sworn in. Giordano and Bill Conroy, writing for NarcoNews.com, report that Palin paid for the bed with her own money.

I don't care, and Giordano doesn't seem to care all that much either. I mention this only in the context of the mockery directed at John Edwards' $400 haircut (and, for that matter, Bill Clinton's tarmac haircut), John Kerry's disturbing preference for Swiss cheese, Barack Obama's failure to scream for ice cream and similar campaign-trail stupidity.

In other words, Sarah Palin must be ... an elitist!

You have to read this

I just finished the New York Times' deeply disturbing overview of Sarah Palin's record as mayor and governor.

I could go on and on, but I'll simply quote Josh Marshall, who says that the article shows Palin to be —

a small-minded person who populates her administration with cronies and grade-school friends, fires those who dare to criticize her and uses the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas. In other words, someone in the habit of abusing official power who should not be let within a mile of being president.

That just about sums it up.

Paying for the news

Wise words from Troy Warren, circulation manager at the Bowling Green Daily News:

The news has always been free. Advertising has paid for the news. Circulation rates cover the cost of delivering the newspaper, so people have been paying us for delivery, not for the news.

I know there are still people who believe everything in the newspaper business will be all right once they can start charging folks for reading their Web sites. It's not going to happen, and Warren explains why it shouldn't.

A slight flaw in the system

Looks like the Houston Chronicle is going all-out in its efforts to keep online readers informed about what's going on in the wake of Ike. But there would appear to be a flaw in the system. Check this out, from an FAQ on the Chronicle's Web site:

Question: When will the power come back on?
Answer: It could take weeks. CenterPoint Energy reports virtually all its customers — 2.1 million of its 2.26 million — are without power as of 10 a.m. Saturday.

Hmmm ... OK, so who in the Houston-Galveston area is able to read the Chronicle's Web site?

Cracking down on toxic food

If injecting donuts with an industrial solvent somehow improved their texture, it wouldn't necessarily follow that adding solvents to donuts should be a matter of individual choice.

There are many reasons to applaud the city of Boston for banning trans fats, and to hope that other regulatory agencies do the same. But what often gets lost in the discussion is that most trans fats are substances unknown to nature.

The proper analogy is not If we let them ban trans fats, the next time they'll ban cheeseburgers. It's Why should trans fats be allowed in food when other poisonous industrial substances are not?

Trans fats are created through an industrial process: pumping hydrogen into vegetable oil, a process that produces an artificial fat that doesn't spoil as quickly as natural fats. Trans fats raise the level of bad cholesterol and lower the good. Scientists say trans fats are more dangerous than any natural fat.

Want more proof? Michael Graham, who traveled to New Hampshire yesterday to deliver tubes of lipstick to Barack Obama, thinks trans fats are just peachy. I rest my case.

Photo (cc) by Duncan Cumming and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

An attempted October surprise

The Bush White House, by all appearances, hasn't made much of an effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden since that botched encounter at Tora Bora in late 2001.

Now NPR reports that the administration is going all out to get bin Laden before Bush leaves office.

If you listen to the audio version of the story, you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that the real goal is to roll up bin Laden even earlier than that — say, a couple of weeks before Election Day.

Shameful.

Filipov touches a chord

David Filipov discovers that his piece about visiting Ground Zero for the first time touched a chord. He even hears from a woman who talked with his father at Logan Airport the morning of the terrorist attacks.

He writes: "The conversation went just as I had always imagined it: Dad talked her up, told him the story of his life, and bragged about his three sons."

The Enquirer targets the Palins

It seems like a political lifetime ago, but it was only last month that the media were flagellating themselves for having ignored the National Enquirer's (accurate) reporting about John Edwards' extramarital affair.

Now the Enquirer is going after Sarah Palin and her family. Should the media dive in and try to verify the Enquirer's claims? Or should they stay silent and risk being made fools of once again? I'm not sure — but that's the question I try to answer in the Guardian.

The definition of hubris

Long ago, a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path — he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer observed, "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

— Sarah Palin in her convention speech, Sept. 3, 2008, comparing her qualifications for the vice presidency to those of Harry Truman.

Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon and stars and all the planets had fallen on me.

— Harry Truman, speaking to reporters on April 13, 1945, upon learning that Franklin Roosevelt had died and he had ascended to the presidency. Truman was serving in his second term as a U.S. senator when FDR chose him to be his third-term running mate, and had won plaudits for his work as chairman of a committee that investigated military waste during World War II.

[O]n January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I'm ready.... I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.

— Sarah Palin, Sept. 11, 2008, responding to Charlie Gibson's question asking her whether she was ready to be president of the United States.

Turning the First Amendment on its head

Robert Ambrogi has posted a 36-page section of the report ordered up by the Boston City Council as part of its crusade to get out of having to comply with the state's open-meeting law.

It's hard to make out and I haven't had a chance to go through it yet. But Ambrogi's comments are on the mark, especially with respect to the councilors' argument that the law impinges upon their own First Amendment rights:

How does that saying go about the devil reading the Bible to his own ends? That was all I could think of as I read a report arguing that the First Amendment gives Boston city councilors the right to conduct the people's business behind closed doors....

The ... premise is that this "prohibition" on private speech between public officials violates their free-speech rights. That is the most extreme contortion of the First Amendment I've ever heard or read.

Ambrogi concludes with a hope that councilors will send the report "straight to the circular file." But that's only going to happen if the press and the public pressures them to do so.

The original Boston Herald story made it pretty clear that some influential members, including president Maureen Feeney and former president Michael Flaherty, think weakening the public's right to know is a neat idea.

He still can't write about it

What struck me about David Filipov's account in today's Boston Globe of his first visit to Ground Zero is that he still can't bring himself to write about his father's death on Sept. 11, 2001.

That's what his piece is purportedly about; but it isn't, as he instead interviews a security guard, two young women from Kazakhstan, a student — anyone, really, who pulls him away from his grief.

It's a moving piece, because it's a reminder of how difficult Filipov and thousands of others still find it to come to terms with what happened on that day.

The online version includes a link to a Filipov piece that was published in the Globe on Oct. 11, 2001, which he filed from Afghanistan.

Driving to work this morning, I started thinking about how much it seemed as it did seven years ago — clear and cool, a perfect September day. It's become a cliché, but it's the truth: Just as all people in our parents' generation know exactly where they were and what they were doing on Dec. 7, 1941, so will all of us remember what happened seven years ago today.

Department of Defense photo by Denise Gould.

Tribal lobbyist faces federal charges

Kevin Ring, a former lobbyist for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and fraud, according to Stephanie Vosk of the Cape Cod Times.

Ring, who used to work for convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, helped the tribe with its application for federal recognition, a key to its bid to build a giant gambling casino in Middleborough.

None other than former tribal council president Glenn Marshall, who stepped down after it was revealed he was a convicted rapist who had lied about his military record, once testified to Ring's good name.

The charges against Ring do not may involve his dealings with the Mashpee. [Update: The charges refer to a "Massachusetts tribal client" that may well have been the Mashpee tribe.]

Cape Cod Today has more.

Murdoch sends a message. But what is it?

This front page is too weird for me to be sure, but I think Rupe's sticking up for Obama. Here's the story.

Sending the bill to rape victims

The man Sarah Palin appointed to run the Wasilla police department thinks that forcing rape victims to pay for their own forensic tests is just a swell idea. He said so himself a little more than eight years ago.

Anchorage Daily News reporter George Bryson writes that former Alaska governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat who took part in a news conference yesterday, charged that a law passed by the state legislature to outlaw that loathsome practice was aimed solely at Wasilla, where Palin was mayor at the time.

"There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," Knowles is quoted as saying. Bryson continues:

A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla's newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.

"[But] the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests," the newspaper reported.

It also quoted Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon objecting to the law. Fannon was appointed to his position by Palin after her dismissal of the previous police chief. He said it would cost Wasilla $5,000 to $14,000 a year if the city had to foot the bill for rape exams.

This should be appalling to any decent-thinking person, needless to say. But working-class women who supported Hillary Clinton — one of the prime demographics the Palin pick is aimed at attracting — really ought to take a close look at their new hero's record.

And please note that Knowles' accusation, though it is a partisan attack, is backed up by facts reported by Palin's hometown newspaper at the time this outrage was unfolding. There is no excusing or explaining away such reprehensible conduct.

Fact-checking FactCheck

Adam Reilly has a terrific post on a highly problematic piece put together by FactCheck.org, Annenberg's normally reliable, nonpartisan debunker of lies and spin. Under the excited title of "Sliming Palin," FactCheck presents five stories it says the media have gotten wrong about Sarah Palin.

Sliming? There's nothing personal in there — it's all on policy and politics, and it includes some errors that have been corrected and some differences in interpretation.

Sliming it isn't, and the folks at FactCheck ought to think about why they've bought into the false construct that the mainstream media (as opposed to, say, Daily Kos and the National Enquirer) are, well, "sliming Palin."

Closed-door government

The Boston City Council, having been found in violation of the state's open-meeting law earlier this year, has come up with an all-too-typical response. According to Boston Herald reporter Ed Mason, council members today will take up an 80-page report that it commissioned urging the state to exempt them from the law.

Council president Maureen Feeney tells Mason that the law presents "challenges" and is "confusing." Before I go any further, you should know that the law does nothing more than require governmental bodies such as the city council to conduct the public's business in public, and to provide adequate notice of when its meetings will take place.

Councilor Michael Flaherty is quoted as saying that the law creates a "chilling effect," claiming, "You can't even have a conversation with colleagues in the hallway or in a session." That's an interesting observation. The law says that a quorum — that is, a majority — of members cannot discuss official business outside the context of a legal, publicly announced meeting.

If Flaherty had said, You can't even have a conversation in the hallway with six or more colleagues about city business, that would be accurate. It would also underscore the absurdity of his complaint.

The law doesn't even require public meetings when there is a good reason for them to be held behind closed doors. Various exceptions are allowed, most typically to discuss contract negotiations and lawsuits.

Any journalist, community activist or public watchdog who's spent any time dealing with municipal government will tell you that the open-meeting law ought to be strengthened, especially with regard to punishing violators.

The law is a burden only to public officials who think the public is a burden.

More on Palin's religious views

Steve Waldman of Beliefnet, who's far more learned and sensible on the subject of religion than I am, takes a close look at Sarah Palin's religious pronouncements and places a few of them in the "scary" category.

In particular, Waldman singles out Palin's request that people pray that a natural-gas pipeline would be built. "Saying a particular public policy is God's will is far over the line, considerably beyond anything that George W. Bush ever said," Waldman writes. "It means the advocate is impervious to argument, and critics are going against God's will." No kidding.

My earlier post on the subject.

Tone-deaf Obama

How could Barack Obama be so tone-deaf as to talk about "lipstick on a pig," given all the lipstick references surrounding Sarah Palin?

The McCain campaign, naturally and shamelessly, is claiming that Obama called Palin a pig, which he didn't. But, really, Obama is almost inviting the Republicans to misinterpret him. (Via Mickey Kaus.)

Now if Obama wants to call Palin a cheap, grasping hack, that would be entirely accurate.

Globe weighs in on Cape Cod libel suit

Stephanie Ebbert reports. Background here and here.

MSNBC's news-opinion dilemma

It looks like the political cross-dressing act at MSNBC has reached its limit. According to Brian Stelter of the New York Times, talk-show hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will not anchor the cable network's coverage of the upcoming debates or on election night, which should tone down the battle between NBC's journalists and MSNBC's opinionators.

I have quibbles about this, but overall I think it was the right move. Barack Obama has no bigger advocates in the mainstream media than Olbermann and Matthews, and it has looked strange all year to have serious journalists like Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell and, before his death, Tim Russert seeming to answer to them. Recently, it all boiled over on the air.

Olbermann and Matthews reportedly will continue to appear as analysts, while David Gregory will serve as the anchor. That's all fine. My larger concern is that in addition to being moved out of the anchor slots, they will also be expected to tone down their opinions, lest they run afoul of the Republicans' current war against the media. Olbermann was exactly right in his revulsion at Republican efforts to stamp their brand on the terrorist attacks of 9/11, even if it was unseemly for him to do it from the anchor desk.

The problem, of course, is that there are no such scruples about the dividing line between news and opinion at Fox News. Stelter, for instance, does not question the fiction that Bill O'Reilly is not allowed to anchor Fox's convention coverage, a piece of information that would be a surprise to anyone tuning in between 8 and 9 p.m. the last two weeks. Fox's signature news personality, Brit Hume, is a good journalist, but he also leans noticeably to the right.

MSNBC this year is experiencing the first semi-success of its benighted existence by loading up on liberal political talk shows. Today Rachel Maddow debuts at 9 p.m., extending that trend. I don't know how long it can last, since the network is still firmly ensconced in last place. But as long as network executives can find a way to keep the journalists and the talkers from ripping each other's throats out, MSNBC has become a refreshing alternative to Fox News.

I just hope it's Williams and Brokaw who are driving the anchor-desk shift — and not Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt.

The Prince of Darkness checks in

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak writes about his battle with brain cancer. Well worth reading. And best wishes to the Prince of Darkness, a true American original.

Teasing out Palin's religious views

Is Sarah Palin a conservative evangelical Christian? Or is she something quite a bit more exotic than that? It's an important question, because she herself has suggested she holds some peculiar beliefs that could affect the way she executes her duties as a public official.

The two best stories I've come across on Palin's religious beliefs are this piece on NPR, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, and one in today's Anchorage Daily News by George Bryson and Richard Mauer.

First, the NPR story. Hagerty, who's been described as a conservative Christian herself (though I can't find a relevant link), does Palin the favor of taking her faith seriously, describing Palin's beliefs as those of a Pentacostal. Here's an excerpt for you to chew over:

"Pray our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country — that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," Palin said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

Poloma [Margaret Poloma, a scholar of Pentacostalism who is a Pentacostal herself] says some people might hear that and say Palin believes this is a holy war, or that Pentecostals think this is a holy war.

"I would think it's fair to say. Yes," Poloma says.

One reason, Poloma says, is that most Pentecostals believe Islam is a false religion.

Let's turn next to the Anchorage Daily News story, which describes her visit to her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, last June. That's the appearance at which she made the comments about God's will and the war, as well as her suggestion that Alaskans should pray for a natural-gas pipeline. Now consider this:

Later, senior pastor Ed Kalnins — with Palin standing at his side — spoke about tapping into Alaska's natural resource wealth in order to fulfill the state's destiny of serving as a shelter for Christians at the end of the world.

"I believe that Alaska is one of the 'refuge states' — come on you guys — in the Last Days," Kalnins said, raising his arm to underscore his point. "And hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to this state to seek refuge. And the church has to be ready to minister to them."

Oh, my.

So what are Palin's own beliefs? It's hard to say, given that neither she nor the McCain campaign is talking about her religion. (And try to remember the last time a Republican candidate at the national level didn't go on about his religious beliefs at great length.)

The Daily News story does hint that perhaps she's not as out-there as some of her activities make it sound — noting, for example, that she advocates but has not pushed for teaching creationism in schools and banning state benefits for same-sex couples. But I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel better if someone prays for a gas pipeline but doesn't actually mean it.

And what about her apparent acquiescence when Pastor Kalnins went off about Alaska's role in a post-Apocalypse world? Does she think he was on to something, or was she just being polite? I would argue that Americans have a right to know if the woman who may be our next vice president uses the Book of Revelations as a guide to forming public policy.

Purely by coincidence, I wrote about the Constitution's lack of a religious test a week before Palin was named. As I argued then, the government may not disqualify a candidate for religious reasons, but we the people are free to judge a candidate on any criteria we like, including religion. We all have our religious test.

Quite frankly, anyone who prays for a gas pipeline violates my religious test. (I'll give her a pass on the war, since her remarks could be construed as merely praying for the safety of the troops.)

How long does the McCain campaign plan on keeping Sarah Palin under wraps? When is she going to answer legitimate questions about her career, her qualifications and her beliefs?

Palin's ethics-complaint maneuvers

Earlier this week Sarah Palin, acting as governor, took out an ethics complaint against herself. She then asked the personnel board to investigate charges that she had abused her office in the "Troopergate" affair. Since the personnel board has jurisdiction, she argued further, then the state Legislature's probe would have to be shut down.

The personnel board is appointed by the governor, though the three currently serving were named by Palin's Republican predecessor, Frank Murkowski, whom she defeated in a hard-fought primary in 2006. But it's not quite that arm's-length; Palin reappointed one of them, Debra English, and English now chairs the board.

Looks like the Alaska Legislature is not going to roll over, though, for the moment at least, Palin has escaped being subpoenaed.

Sarah Palin's tall eBay tale

In her convention speech on Wednesday, Sarah Palin wowed the delegates by telling them she had taken her predecessor's taxpayer-funded luxury jet and sold it on eBay.

Oh, wait ... she said she "put it on eBay."

Big difference, as it turns out, because it didn't sell, and she eventually turned it over to a private broker, who unloaded it at a loss. So on top of everything else, it appears that we also have to parse every word she says.

No such problem with John McCain, who bragged the other day that Palin "sold it on eBay — made a profit." That's just wrong.

More on that Cape Cod blogger suit

David Ardia, writing for the Citizen Media Law Project, has posted a PDF of the actual lawsuit brought against Cape Cod Today blogger Peter Robbins (photo at left), which I described this past weekend.

According to Ardia, Robbins and a pseudonymous commenter — in the original, unedited blog post — made several statements that could prove to be troublesome concerning plaintiff Joe Dugas and others involved in trying to stop the dredging of Barnstable Harbor.

As Ardia notes, the standard in libel law is that a factual assertion, even if it is couched in the form of an opinion, could be libelous if it is judged as false and defamatory. That's what Dugas and his lawyer, Paul Revere III, claim in their suit against Robbins and "noggin," the pseudonymous commenter.

On the other hand, Ardia writes, the decision by Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks to remove the material Dugas found objectionable could substantially limit the amount of damages the plaintiffs might collect.

One other thing: In an e-mail to Media Nation, Ardia says I was wrong to assert that federal law protects Internet service providers such as Cape Cod Today as long as they promptly remove potentially libelous content. According to Ardia, an ISP retains its immunity even if it does not remove the material.

"No court has found that a website operator must respond or remove allegedly libelous content to retain immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act," Ardia writes. And he guesses, correctly, that I was getting confused with copyright law, which does indeed hold an ISP harmless as long as it promptly responds to complaints of copyright infringement.

Media lawyer Robert Ambrogi also weighs in on the Robbins case, as well as another libel suit brought against a blogger, asking, "Has someone installed a hair trigger on libel lawsuits against bloggers? If you don't like what a blogger writes, just take a litigation potshot."

Media reaction to McCain's speech

In my latest for the Guardian, I survey the mediascape and find there's at least one thing liberals and conservatives can agree on: John McCain's speech was a snooze.

The conservative case against Palin

Charles Krauthammer makes it cogently. And I'll add this: If McCain had, say, talked Condoleezza Rice into being his running mate, don't you think McCain could spend the rest of the campaign writing his inaugural address? Even despite her deep involvement in Bush's failures?

The grand anticlimax

Last night was a better night for the Republicans than tonight.

Let's see if I can criticize McCain's constant invocation of his POW experience without driving an angry mob to chant "USA! USA!" outside my window: Might we agree that by having every single surrogate tell the tale of McCain's imprisonment, torture and resistance in hushed, dramatic tones, he has allowed the story to be robbed of some of its power?

I wish I could offer more specific observations, but I'm going to have to read the text in the morning. I will confess that I fell dead asleep twice and probably missed about 10 minutes. It wasn't entirely my fault.

Anyway, it's over. He'll get his bounce. And on we go.

John Carroll signs on with WBUR

John Carroll, one of the sharpest media observers I know, has signed on as a commentator with WBUR Radio (90.9 FM). Here's the press release from WBUR:

"Beat the Press" panelist John Carroll will beat a familiar path back to WBUR in the role of senior media analyst starting next week, announced Sam Fleming, managing director of News & Programming at Boston's NPR news station.

Carroll, a regular WBUR commentator for more than 10 years prior to moving to WGBH-TV's "Greater Boston" in the mid '90s, will analyze electoral and print media during the presidential race, and following the election, he will dissect issues related to advertising, politics and culture.

"Our listeners have longed missed John's wry observations about media and advertising, particularly commercial messages peddled by candidates of all persuasions in the midst of elections," said Fleming. "We look forward to his return."

In addition to serving as a regular panelist on WGBH-TV's popular Friday night program "Beat the Press," Carroll was the executive producer of WGBH-TV's "Greater Boston" for five years. An assistant professor of Mass Communication at Boston University, Carroll has won numerous national and regional journalism awards, including the RTNDA's Edward R. Murrow award for writing, the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse award for press criticism, and multiple New England Emmys for commentary and news writing.

Over the past 20 years, the Xavier University alum has also written extensively on advertising and the media as a regular columnist for The Boston Globe and Adweek magazine. He also spent nearly two decades as a creative director and consultant in the advertising industry.

I've got a lot of respect for John, and I wish him well in his new venture.

When Barack O. met Bill-O

O'Reilly let Obama get in a few words, but he didn't get carried away. After all, if Obama had been allowed to speak a complete sentence, it might look like O'Reilly was losing control of the show.

Beating the press

I'll be on "Beat the Press" tomorrow (WGBH-TV, Channel 2, 7 p.m.). Among the topics we'll be discussing is Sarah Palin and the media.

Also tomorrow, I'll be wrapping up media commentary on John McCain's big speech for the Guardian.

Obama, Palin and experience

For several days now, I've been thinking about the notion that Sarah Palin is just as experienced as Barack Obama — or, for that matter, more experienced, since she's got executive experience and he doesn't. I find it ludicrous, so it took me a while to wrap my arms around it.

Though "experience" and "qualifications" are being treated in this campaign as though they are the same thing, they are not. Experience is one of the things you look at — an important thing — in deciding whether someone is qualified. But there are other factors, too.

Let's stipulate that Obama is less experienced than would be ideal, though I would argue that his years in the legislature of a large industrial state is vastly more relevant than Palin's time running a tiny town, followed by her cup of coffee as governor. Despite Obama's lack of experience at the national level, few people in public life today have done more serious reading, thinking and speaking about the wide array of national and international issues that will face the next president.

Thus the question with Obama is whether his deep knowledge of the issues, much of it theoretical and academic, will hold up once he gets slapped in the face by reality. It's a legitimate concern. Ideally Obama would have run in 2012 or 2016. But politics is never ideal, and he took the risk — a smart risk, in my view — that it was better to run before he was as experienced as he ought to be than become just one of the Washington crowd.

Obama's qualifications are his experience, his knowledge and his judgment. Voters have been probing those three elements for many months now and have gotten to know quite a lot about him.

Then there is Palin, who was thrust upon the nation less than a week ago. Most of Palin's experience is virtually identical to chairing the board of selectmen in a small New England town. Sorry, but Obama's years as a community organizer and as a state legislator, and his short time in the U.S. Senate, are vastly more relevant than Palin's years as mayor and her brief stint as the governor of state with the population of Boston — a state awash in so much oil money that the only question is how to spend it.

So what about the rest of her qualifications? Her knowledge and her judgment? That's what we're all trying to find out now. I've made it clear that I think she comes up short on both fronts. There is no evidence that she's ever given more than superficial thought to any national or international issue other than energy, and I'm not sure how her ideas differ from Obama's except that she wants to drill, drill, drill. And why not? She thinks the views of the vast majority of the world's atmospheric scientists — that humans are contributing to global warming — are mere opinions with which she is free to agree or disagree. And she disagrees.

Jon Keller, in his commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning, argued that experience is overrated, and that both Palin and Obama have enough. I don't quite agree, but I agree with him that that's not how voters will ultimately make up their minds.

People will vote for the Obama-Biden team or the McCain-Palin team on the basis of issues, values and party identification. In the end, experience is just something to talk about.

At newspapers, the slashing continues

Budget-slashing at newspapers continues, both locally and nationally.

At the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 36 positions are being cut and zoned local editions are being eliminated, according to the Daily Worcesteria, which adds: "This is the journalistic equivalent of bunkering in at the last, strongest point and abandoning the outposts."

Ironically, the Daily Worcesteria is part of Worcester Magazine, which is shedding positions following an ownership change, reports the, uh, Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

The T&G, as you probably know, is owned by the New York Times Co., whose New England Newspaper Group (the T&G, the Boston Globe and Boston.com) suffered a 24.5 percent loss in advertising revenue in July as compared to the same month in 2007.

Things are at least as grim on the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley, as CNHI, the corporate owner of the Eagle-Tribune papers, announced this week that it is eliminating 52 jobs, writes Boston Herald media reporter Jessica Heslam. The chain comprises the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times.

And it's no better elsewhere. Alan Mutter, who writes the Newsosaur blog, tells us today that newspaper revenues are down $3 billion over the first six months of 2008, bringing revenues to their lowest level in a dozen years.

Even online revenues are slipping, Mutter says, which shows that what's happening now has as much to do with the economic recession as it does with the stampede from print to the Web.