TPM has a astounding video of Fox lying about NY-23 over the course of days. Well done, fellows! Sounds like somebody will getting another Peabody soon.

A few Monday links.

* NJ-GOV Watch: As yet another ethics scandal hits Chris Christie, a poll shows him down 42-33 to Corzine. I think this particular poll is probably an outlier, but nonetheless I think Corzine may actually win this thing.

* Looking through Steve Benen's newsfeed this morning I was struck by how many stories he's found in the last few days about Republicans baldly misreporting clearly labeled satire as fact. Glenn Beck: Nancy Pelosi to ban Fox News! Rush Limbaugh: Obama's nonexistent thesis hates America! Of course, they just make things up, too.

* Airlock Alpha says Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is worse than Razor. That's too bad, because Razor really wasn't very good. The reviewer makes a great point here:

At the same time, the most interesting parts of the Cylon story were cut out or not even considered for this film. Really!

I mean, look at this way. You had the Final Five who show up in the middle of the first Cylon war. They offer the Centurions evolutionary advancement in terms of resurrection and becoming more like their human creators, so the war ends. After the skinjobs are created, the Cylons try to simply live their lives away from the humans, but Cavil wants revenge.

When the Final Five get in his way, he kills them, and then resurrects them, depositing them all over the Twelve Colonies, giving them a front-row seat to the holocaust he's about to unleash.

This is great storytelling by itself. Except we only get the end of this tale in "The Plan." We don't get to see the Final Five arrive, we don't get to see Cavil's betrayal. Instead, we pick up with Cavil already having deposited the Final Five in the Colonies and go from there.

It's very odd to see them go the clip-show route when a better story really was just sitting there unused.

* And via Atrios, Detroit can't give away land. The unemployment and outmigration numbers in Michigan are just staggering. From a policy perspective I have no idea how you fix this.

So rather than pointing out what actually happened -- that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations -- they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it's not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that's not their role, since they're objective and unbiased.

Glenn Greenwald on the 9/12 rally and reality's well-documented liberal bias.

UPDATE: Steve Benen just put up another case study in media "objectivity."

Friday night! Let's linkdump.

* If you sent a letter to Whole Foods about the John Mackey Wall Street Journal editorial, you probably got a response tonight. I'd post what I received, but the small print at the bottom instructs me I cannot:

This email contains proprietary and confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others without the permission of the sender is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of the message.

I certainly appreciate their crafting a non-apology apology for my sole use. I don't know how Daily Kos got a hold of it.

* NJ-GOV blogging: TPM, TPM, FiveThirtyEight.com.

* Also in Jersey news: Bob Dylan hassled by local NJ cop.

* NC-SEN blogging: Everyone hates Richard Burr.

* Airlock Alpha speaks the truth: it's obviously too early for another Battlestar Galactica reboot.

* 'Amusing Ourselves to Death': Huxley vs. Orwell.



* From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit.

* SF on HBO?

* Joe Siegel's heirs have won rights to a few more early Superman stories.

* Whitney Phillips at Confessions of an Aca/Fan tracks down the provenance of the recent Obama/Joker/SOCIALISM graffiti. Of course, it was 4chan.

* Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?

Friday morning links!

* Daddy, where do lies come from? The New York Times reports. Via Steve Benen.

* Never forget: xkcd remembers Oregon.

* Overthinking It on the transdimensionality of Fraggles.

* Conversing with Marginalised People for Dummies. (via MeFi)

* And Amanda Marcotte celebrates Mad Men and its interrogation of the consumerist origins of the American sense of self.

On Mad Men, the ad executives believe that they possess the power of illusion. In the series pilot, Don woos a client and potential lover by replying, when she states that she believes in love, "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." Let's hope Mad Men continues its brave path and goes into season three exploring the possibility that the '60s youth culture was also created by ad executives looking to sell coffee and miniskirts.

What's astounding to me is not the belligerent stupidity of a person willing to volunteer to be tortured but the fact that, even granting this kind of immense belligerent stupidity, these five-second waterboardees nonetheless admit afterwards that they were wrong. Wouldn't we expect them to go the other way, to retrench and insist it really wasn't that bad? It's an absolutely perfect opportunity for macho posturing, yet they demur. What's stopping people who lie in basically every aspect of their public lives from lying about this as well? It's weird.

The Internet keeps distracting me.

* This is brazenly dishonest, even by Fox standards.

* When Reagan tried to convert Gorbachev to Christianity. You mean that's not the job he was elected to do?

* Great news, or greatest news? New Line pursuing a MacGyver movie. The opening to the MacGyver This American Life (free to stream) goes a long way towards explaining his continued appeal seventeen years after the show went off the air.

* David Chase's Sopranos follow-up has been announced: it's an epic history of the movie industry beginning in 1913.

* And get your "disrepecting the office" talking points ready: Barack Obama will be the first sitting president to go on The Tonight Show. If only Conan had already taken over...

Despite my busy schedule, it's been a bit of a slow news day anyway.

* The ATF busted up a mostly aspirational skinhead plot to kill Barack Obama, which included a much more logistically likely subplot to attack a predominantly African-American high school in Tennessee.

* Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has been found guilty on all counts.

* Another day, another bogus Republican vote suppression list thrown out. Today it's Georgia.

* Chuck Todd just told me on the TV that 1/2 the total 2004 turnout in North Carolina has already voted this year.

* The Field notes that Obama has cleared the 50% threshold in states totaling 286 electoral votes.

* And today's moronic right-wing lie: deliberately misquoting an eight-year-old radio interview to give the impression that Comrade Obama supports court-ordered wealth redistribution. (He doesn't. In fact, echoing the right's own talking points, what he actually says in the interview is that sort of social change should not be pursued in the courts.) On this Ambinder makes an interesting point: Republicans have managed to take an election that was clearly a referendum on Bush and turned it into a referendum on the last thirty years of their failed politics. Quite an accomplishment.

It's been said before, but Kos is absolutely right: these instapolls have been a tremendously important bulwark against the neverending bullshit of the pundit class. They've been so devastating, in fact, to the fine art of pro-Republican spin—an art which went a long way towards giving us eight years of Bush—that I genuinely wonder whether we'll see them again in 2012. I sure hope we do.

The McCain campaign directive that 'The Ayers smears we've been enjoying from the McCain campaign since the weekend are apparently no longer operative' (issued, you may recall, just yesterday) is apparently no longer operative.

I guess this was the "major announcement." (UPDATE: Martin confirms it was.)

Well done, sir.



UPDATE: Somebody owes Alex $20.

In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove—the man who held the previous record—said McCain's ads have gone too far.

When you've lost Karl Rove...

Contrary to reports that his fund-raising had slowed, Obama raised $66 million in August. First on the agenda, based on the racheting up of rhetoric I've mentioned in other posts, should be ads hitting McCain hard on his constant lies.

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, George Saunders explains why he's more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin.

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.

Here's a list of McCain camp lies I've seen exposed in articles I've read just in the last half-hour.

* Lying about their crowd sizes.

McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal.

Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it. Wilson, in an interview, said the fire department does not monitor attendance at outdoor events.

In recent days, journalists attending the rallies have been raising questions about the crowd estimates with the campaign. In a story on Sept. 11 about Palin's attraction for some Virginia women voters, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher estimated the crowd to be 8,000, not the 23,000 cited by the campaign.

* Lying about the Bridge to Nowhere even more egregiously than we thought.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has portrayed herself as a foe of pork-barrel spending, pointing in particular to her role in killing the $398 million "Bridge to Nowhere” between Ketchikan (pop. 7,400) and its airport on Gravina Island (pop. 50). I "told the Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,'" she said in her speech accepting the Republican vice presidential nomination. "If our state wanted to build a bridge, we were going to build it ourselves."

But Gov. Palin’s administration acknowledges that it is still pursuing a project that would link Ketchikan to its airport -- with the help of as much as $73 million in federal funds earmarked by Congress for the original project.

* Lying about her "trip to Iraq."

Sarah Palin's visit to Iraq in 2007 consisted of a brief stop at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait, the vice presidential candidate's campaign said yesterday, in the second official revision of her only trip outside North America.

Following her selection last month as John McCain's running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a "military outpost" inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin's foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

* Lying about Future Combat Systems.

“He promised them he would, quote, ‘slow our development of Future Combat Systems,’” McCain said, according to wire reports. “This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems.”

Flashback to July, however, when his campaign furnished McCain’s economic plan to The Washington Post, declaring that “there are lots of procurements — Airborne Laser, [C-17] Globemaster, Future Combat System [sic] — that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed.”

* Lying about book-banning at the local library.

So, what do we know at this point? Time reported last week that Palin asked Emmons about the process for banning library books. Emmons was reportedly "aghast" at the question. Soon after, Palin fired Emmons, and news reports from the time indicate that Palin thought Emmons hadn't done enough to give her "full support" to the mayor. (Palin reversed course on Emmons's dismissal after a local outcry.)

ABC News added a report this week, explaining that Palin took office thanks in large part to the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, which, right around the time Palin took office, "began to focus on certain books" the church wanted to see removed from shelves.

And now we know Palin repeatedly broached the subject of banning books, and locals acknowledge that Palin, as mayor, "brought pressure on the library."

* Lying about the truly despicable practice of making women in Wasilla pay for their own rape kits.

Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence.

Palin's role is now confirmed by Wasilla City budget documents available online.

They will lie without shame, as long as the media will not shame them.

Brave New Films has a three-and-a-half-minute compendium of McCain's most major lies. It's a message that's long been seen on the blogs, but is finally taking hold in the mainstream media; a Daily Kos diary compiles "McCain is lying" stories from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Times again, and the Dallas Morning News. (If only people still read newspapers!)

Rope-a-dope or just plain lucky, the Obama campaign has begun to speak on this:

“We will take no lectures from John McCain who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern Presidential campaign history. His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Good. Every surrogate should be saying this, and no Democratic surrogates should be praising McCain's integrity, personal courage, or fundamental decency. Not anymore. Not after the McCain campaign all has but admitted that it doesn't give a damn about the truth:

“We recognize it’s not going to be 2000 again,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media’s swooning coverage of McCain’s ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. “But he lost then. We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

That means you, too, Joe Biden.

That means you, too, Barack Obama.

I expect the basic, inescapable dishonesty of the McCain campaign to be a major issue both in the coming week and at the first presidential debate on September 26. Even the media has caught on to the fact that McCain/Palin hasn't said a single true thing in weeks. When you've lost The View, you've lost America.

Obligatory McCain/Palin posting: Team Maverick™ has lost even the AP, whose Washington Bureau is famously staffed by a man MoveOn has been trying to get fired for bias and conflict of interest. It's the lying, stupid:

The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Krugman, too, is outraged, and Josh Marshall (to his credit) has basically been having a week-long freakout. Here's Krugman:

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

They're not the only ones. ThinkProgress has a growing list of McCain's ever-shifting positions. (Steve Benen has another one.) Basically every post on the respected and independent factcheck.org from the last week has about McCain's lies. And on The View, just today, he falsely claimed that Sarah Palin had never requested an earmark as governor—a flagrant, wild lie.

It's a farcical situation that turns tragic with the media's refusal to properly report any of it. The cost for lying must be public approbation—otherwise politicians will lie constantly. The failure of the news media since the Republican convention to substantively report on basic, easily provable distortions is as great a betrayal of the public trust as any other over the last ten years. And as we all know well, all too well, that is saying a lot.

Obama, too, hasn't yet done enough. But that may soon change: a spokesperson today claimed that McCain "would rather lose his integrity than lose an election," presumably the first salvo in their new aggressive approach. I've got a lot of faith in Obama and his team; as I've mentioned before, whenever I've disagreed with their decisions they've turned out to be (more or less) right. Obama is cautious, perhaps too cautious, when it comes to hitting back—but it's gotten him this far.

I agree, that is to say, with Noam Scheiber: I really think Obama's been playing rope-a-dope, letting McCain embarrass himself with nonsense 50-days-and-change out from November 4—and now that McCain has completely overreached, Obama's free to hit back as hard as he wants. Let's hope the gloves really are coming off, finally and at last.

Elsewhere in politics, the indispensable Chuck Todd updates the electoral map (and the current toss-up states), while the Obama camp finally steps up to call a lie a lie. Todd has some good news for North Carolinians:

We came VERY close to moving North Carolina to toss-up, but until we see one decent poll showing Obama ahead, we're not there yet.

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters’ attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false. Via Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein.