Yeah, we barely dodged that one, didn’t we?

The cult of the lost cause endures:

Because grifters can’t always get their cons to work on everyone:

Economic Crisis, The Audit – November 8, 2010 09:25 PM

Sarah Palin, Media Critic

The former veep candidate (and journalism major) misleads readers on the WSJ with selective quotes

By Ryan Chittum

….So, Palin is hammering the Journal and Reddy for pointing out that she’s flat wrong about grocery prices going up significantly in the past year. What does she do? She quotes a separate Journal story that confirms what Reddy is saying-and cuts out that part with three dots. Nice!

Palin has a journalism degree, so I’m guessing she knows what an ethical no-no it is to misquote somebody like that. It ought to be awfully hard for her to get on her pedestal and condemn the media when she can’t even quote somebody honestly. How about to make it up to Reddy, Palin lets a real reporter like him fly out to Wasilla to interview her for once instead of going to her house folks at Fox News?

Maybe they can talk about the possible wave of food inflation coming our way.

It looks like the Wall Street Journal and the Columbia Journalism Review won’t be able to sit at the lunch table with all the other kewl kidz for a long while.

Also, too.

Truth in labeling for the former half term governor…

Unintentional irony in the cult of the lost cause?

Maybe not.

Kingsville, Missouri: “Move over, slow down.”

Senators Mitch McConnell (r), John McCain (r), and Kit Bond (r) came to Kansas City on Monday for a closed (to the public) health care forum. They obviously weren’t too interested in fielding questions from teabaggers.

The coverage in today’s Kansas City Star was revealing. The dead trees headline in the Kansas City Edition, page B1:

HEALTH REFORM BLASTED IN KC: At Children’s Mercy, three GOP senators say say compromise with Democrats hasn’t been found

Online:

GOP senators criticize health care overhaul during forum in KC

By STEVE KRASKE

The Kansas City Star

….The Republicans said they also were miffed at Democrats for not doing enough to include them in ongoing negotiations.

“So far, there’s been no bipartisanship involved in reforming health care in America,” McCain complained….

[emphasis added]

Okay, just hold on a minute there. Senator Claire McCaskill (D) stated in Jefferson City (and at three other town halls I attended):

….[18:40] And the other thing you can do there, which might be interesting, ’cause you’re here and you obviously care very deeply, you might watch the live video, not live, it’s taped video, of all the the mark up sessions in the [Senate] bill. Fifty-two hours of mark up sessions on the bill. Thirteen Democrats, ten Republicans. There were a lot of amendments, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds that were written up. There were about two hundred that were considered. Of the two hundred amendments that were considered and adopted on this bill in this fifty-two hours a hundred and sixty-seven of them were sponsored by the Republican members of the committee and thirty-one of them were sponsored by the Democratic members of the committee. So, there was [applause], there were really a bipartisan [crowd shouting], the interesting thing [voice, shouting: “What happened to the other thirty (inaudible)?”] there really was a bi, and you can watch it. You can go on and watch it. You don’t have to read something that somebody else has written. You can go on and watch it live. You can see the Republican members offering the amendments. You can see the discussion. You can understand, maybe the, the thinking behind some of the amendments and why they were offering them. And it might be a way that you could see, face to face, what really happened in fifty-two hours of consideration on this bill, instead of some of the misinformation that’s gotten out there [19:57]….

“…Of the two hundred amendments that were considered and adopted on this bill in this fifty-two hours a hundred and sixty-seven of them were sponsored by the Republican members of the committee and thirty-one of them were sponsored by the Democratic members of the committee….”

Someone other than a stenographer might try to reconcile those competing statements.

The videos of the Senate bill mark ups are here:

Committee: Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

Date: Wednesday, June 17 – Friday, June 26,

Place: SD-106 / SR-325…

Blogs exist because old media phones it in. And nature abhors a vacuum.

Missouri:

McCain – 50%

Obama – 48%

…The poll indicates another state Bush carried in 2004, Missouri, is basically a dead heat. McCain holds a 2-point lead in the poll, 50 percent to 48 percent, well within in the survey’s sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.

The poll was also expanded to include the major third party candidates, independent Ralph Nader, Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. None of them are polling over 4 percent in any of the states CNN polled and none of them seem to be a factor in the outcome of the results in those five states other than Missouri, where Nader’s 4 percent showing could have an impact…

…The CNN/Time/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted Thursday through Tuesday, with…825 likely voter in Missouri…questioned by telephone.

MISSOURI

Obama – 48%

McCain – 47%

Barr – 1%

Nader – 2%

McKny – 0%

Not Sure – 3%

10/26/2008

…In Missouri, Obama is up by a single percentage point, 48% to 47%. That’s the strongest showing yet for McCain in polling conducted during October and comes just after his weakest showing of the year when he trailed by five a week ago. However, as we noted at the time, last week’s survey was conducted the day after Obama held two massive rallies in the state. Despite these ups and downs, Obama has held a very slight lead-from one to five points–in all four Fox News/Rasmussen Reports Missouri polls conducted during October.

SurveyUSA released a 672 sample poll of “Likely voters” on October 27th taken in Missouri October 25th through the 26th. The poll runs a head to head match up between McCain and Obama. The margin of error is 3.9%.

The poll was sponsored by KCTV in Kansas City and KMOX in St. Louis.

If the election for President were today, would you vote for … (choices rotated) Republican John McCain? Democrat Barack Obama? Or one of the other candidates?

All

McCain – 48%

Obama – 48%

Other – 3%

Undecided – 1%

The actual count (frequencies) puts this into some perspective:

If the election for President were today, would you vote for … (choices rotated) Republican John McCain? Democrat Barack Obama? Or one of the other candidates?

All [frequency]

McCain – 320

Obama – 325

Other – 17

Undecided – 10

Brett Penrose on cold weather politics:

Released October 21, 2008:

Missouri (11)

McCain-Palin 48.3%

Obama-Biden 48.0%

Not Sure/Other 4.6%

Both candidates run strongly with their base constituencies, and for now independents aren’t breaking either way. So we have a tie.

Zogby Interactive – Missouri Oct 17 – Oct 20 n=717 – MOE +/- 3.7 percentage points

The folks at fivethirtyeight don’t think very highly of Zogby Interactive:

Pollster   Pollster-Introduced Error

Zogby Interactive +5.73

Average pollster +1.97

Take this one with a grain of salt, or two, or three, or 5.73.

Any attempt at comprehensive coverage of the event by us would never get off the ground.

In case you haven’t already figured it out, we’re not there.

We’ve previously attempted to cover a McCain campaign event in our area – with some success. It’s just that we weren’t made to feel particularly welcome:

After two days of calling McCain headquarters asking for credentials (they don’t do credentials) to today’s town hall at Union Station in Kansas City I was told to show up with my identification. They put me on their media notification e-mail list and I received the press logistics notice. So I hauled myself out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and got to Union Station at about 7:30 a.m. Then we waited around for a while. Then we went through security…

…They didn’t know what to do with all the “freelancers” who showed up to cover this event. After a bit of head scratching from the people on the ground they decided to let us “media orphans” in…

…Then we were informed we might be asked to leave. Then we were informed we’d be allowed to stay…

To be fair, I did get in (Hey there, Tina!), but apparently not everyone can anymore:

…Something interesting is happening with John McCain’s campaign. Up until now, we’ve had no trouble gaining access to field offices and volunteers. Here in St. Louis, we were told by Tina Hervey, Missouri Republican State Party Press Secretary, that she had never heard of FiveThirtyEight, and while they trusted Politico, we were people who they had to decide whether we “shouldn’t or don’t need to be talking to.” (McCain’s Missouri press secretary actually works out of Iowa, and did not return calls or email.) I told Tina that’s not a story we wanted to write, that this was our first Republican resistance, and that while she may not have heard of us, we’d probably go over 2.5 million site visits this week, now that we’re regularly past 400,000 per weekday. I told her I’d hold off writing her flat refusal and give her the opportunity to change her mind.

No budging. We were told that we’d be asked to leave public field offices we now attempted to visit. We did not get any promised follow-up helping get access to the post-debate Palin rally last night, and we were locked out. Hmm…

Given our past experience, the present environment, and the tone of the event advisory, we at Show Me Progress were not even going to try to cover the Belton event.

Okay, after I figured I wouldn’t have a chance of getting into the event, I received this:

MEDIA ADVISORY

McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Conference Call

For Immediate Release

Contact: Press Office

Monday, October 20, 2008…

…ARLINGTON, VA — Today, at 4:00 p.m. EDT, McCain-Palin 2008 will hold a press conference call with Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Randy Scheunemann, McCain-Palin Foreign Policy Adviser to discuss Joe Biden’s admission that Barack Obama’s election will precipitate an international crisis.

Monday, October 20, 2008

PRESS CONFERENCE CALL

WHO: Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani

         Randy Scheunemann, McCain-Palin Foreign Policy Adviser

WHAT: Press Conference Call

WHEN: Monday, October 20, 2008 at 4:00 p.m. EDT

[emphasis added]

Must be payback for “Noun, verb, 9/11”.

This would be really interesting.

So I figured I’d dial into the conference call. Busy signal. I kid you not. I’ve never called into a conference call that didn’t pick up right away. Is it really possible to get a busy signal?

It’s a symptom of the universe and the state of McCain’s campaign…