If you're pro-choice, John McCain isn't for you. Here he is earlier tonight at the Saddleback forum:

I have a 25 year record pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate, and as President of the United States I will be a pro-life president, and this presidency will have pro-life policies. That's my commitment. That's my commitment to you.

Too bad he isn't pro-life when it comes to war.

The key thing to remember is that the audience at the Saddleback Church was heavily disposed towards McCain, both demographically and ideologically. So while McCain did well (even though he annoyed the heck out me personally), it really wasn't much a challenge for him. I thought Barack Obama did just as well as McCain, and given the makeup of the audience, that's a remarkable achievement.

I also think McCain's firm answer on being pro-life will haunt him. There are so many people out there who believe John McCain is pro-choice, and this is the strongest video evidence yet showing that he's not just personally pro-life, but also committed to leading a pro-life presidency.

Now that President Bush's approval rating has soared all the way up to 33%, will John McCain rediscover his public love for Bush 43? (Nothing can change the fact that he's voted with Bush 100% of the time in 2008 and 95% in 2007.)

And yes, I am mocking Michael Goldfarb, the McCain campaign's blogger and resident D&D expert.

I posted this in the vodpod a few days ago, but didn't blog it separately. It's one of the most concise expostulations of what the core message ought to be, and the best part is it has some real facts that a lot of people don't know -- like the fact that McCain voted with Bush 100% of the time in 2008 and 95% in 2007.

And the cool thing is that it was created by an Obama supporter who simply wanted to make a point -- a point which has been heard well over 100,000 times already.

Jake Tapper asks the big questions:

Is a Liberal Christian Group’s TV Ad Suggesting McCain is an Adulterer?

I don't know Jake. Why don't you ask McCain?

Update: McCain sued ex-wife after affair with Cindy (digg it)

So Jake Tapper is now accusing Barack Obama's campaign of "rewriting history" in its refutation of smear author Jerome Corsi. Tapper does qualify his allegation by admitting that he holds Obama to a higher standard than Corsi, who he says peddling fiction.

But the thrust of Tapper's piece is that Obama's campaign is being less than truthful in its refutation. The problem is that Tapper's re-refutation leaves a lot to be desired, at least if you're interested in the truth.

CNN reports the story, and Jack Cafferty explains why it is the case.

I haven't been paying nearly as much attention to the situation with Russia and Georgia as I ought to have, but tonight I finally took a few minutes to acquaint myself with some of the basic facts of the situation.

If you already know your stuff about the crisis, the information in this post will be old hat, but if you were like me you might find some of these links interesting. If you have anything to ad, or I've said anything boneheaded, please sound off in the comments -- I'm eager to learn more, and I'm sure others are as well.

From earlier today on CNN:

GOP strategist John Feehery attacks Barack Obama for proposing a UN Security Council resolution to deal with the crisis in Georgia...but John McCain has the exact same position.

It provided for a funny moment on Hardball -- but only if you knew the facts. Unfortunately, neither host David Shuster nor Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis knew the truth, so nobody corrected the record.

Here's video of Feehery's errant attack, along with McCain taking the exact same position Feehery was skewering.

Barack Obama visits the Erie Bolt Company in Erie, PA (April 18, 2008)

Greg Sargent reports the details of Obama's new theme, which will be rolled out tomorrow in Pennsylvania.

Asked earlier today about the anti-Obama smears spread by bigot Jerome Corsi, John McCain made of light of them, saying you "gotta' keep your sense of humor" about such vicious falsehoods.

But after the Obama campaign said those comments were out of line, McCain's aides started to backpedal, now claiming that McCain couldn't hear the question.

Here's video from FOX about McCain's comments, and his staff's backpedal. Initially, FOX laughs along with McCain...and then an hour later, they're saying he couldn't hear the question.

YouTube link

Let me emphasize that Carl Cameron's report came an hour after the initial report -- McCain's aides only came up with the "he couldn't hear it" story after they realized what their boss had stepped in.

Color me skeptical. If McCain didn't hear the question, why did he answer it?

This was a strange, somewhat paranoid comment (emphasis added):

“You’re looking trim," Pickens told McCain as they engaged in some small talk. Pickens mentioned yesterday’s Census article in a newspaper about how non-Hispanic whites would no longer be the majority in 2042.

“You and I won't have to worry about that,” Pickens said jokingly, referring to the age of the two men. 

What would there be to worry about? Is Pickens really that tribalistic? He might have just been joshing around, but knowing his political views I doubt it.

CNN:

After he emerged from the meeting, a reporter asked McCain his reaction to the new Jerome Corsi book, "Obama Nation."

"Gotta keep your sense of humor," McCain responded, before his aides shuttled reporters away.

The Obama campaign slammed McCain's comments (via turneresq):

What does John McCain think is funny about an intolerant smear artist who called Pope John Paul II senile and claims the government lied about 9/11?

I know a lot of you have already seen the Obama campaign's booklet on Jerome Corsi's smear job, but for those of you who haven't, here's a link. To be honest, I didn't bother reading the whole thing because it's so obvious that Corsi is a lying bigoted hack and that the whole effort is a political smear. But if you've got friends who believe the stuff and you want a resource with which to combat the lies, this 41 page debunking of Corsi is a good place to start.

The important thing to realize about Jerome Corsi is that his smears say more about him and the people who support him than they do about Barack Obama.

This is really a story of a right-wing attack machine that's tried the same trick one to many times, and this time they are getting it thrown right back in their face.

On Wednesday, Paul Waldman of Media Matters did just that, schooling Corsi on Larry King Live -- and ripping Mary Matalin and her GOP cronies for supporting him.

Here's video. I've edited the thirty minute segment down to a three and a half minute package.

Anti-Obama smear author Jerome Corsi thinks writing for WorldNetDaily is one of his most impressive accomplishments as a human being.

Sad thing is, he might be right.

Hard to believe that both the NYT and WaPo frontpaged this yokel. A story about bigfoot would've been more interesting.

Guest post by barath

Guest post by barath

Note from Jed: barath is a long-time kossack who has supported Barack Obama from the beginning. He and I have worked together on various projects online over the past few months, most recently on the collection of closed captioning data, which he describes in this post. barath has performed a remarkably interesting analysis and I hope you agree. You can also find the post here on Daily Kos.

To help keep pace with all of the election coverage on the 24/7 news channels -- CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News -- Jed has been archiving closed captioning data.  However, the sheer volume of text makes it hard to analyze.

In this guest post, I'll show several automatically generated images (word clouds) that highlight the prevalence of certain words in election coverage on these three channels; the analysis is over the last week's worth of closed captioning feeds.  Let's look at the top 20 words on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News (from left to right):

CNN	MSNBC	Fox

Analysis and methods below the fold...

A recent study from George Mason University found that in major network news coverage "28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative" whereas for McCain "43% of the statements positive and 57% negative".  (The fact that coverage for both of them is more than 50% negative isn't that surprising - it's easy for pundits to tear into candidates.)  It's hard to determine using a purely automated analysis whether references to Obama or McCain were positive or negative, but if we combine the GMU study with this one, it becomes plainly obvious that Obama gets the short end of the media stick: not only is Obama talked about far more in the media, but the majority of that coverage is negative.

Keeping that in mind, note how MSNBC has the most "balance" (relatively speaking) between "Obama" and "McCain" and Fox News has the least balance.  In addition, it's possible that Fox News also references Obama by his full name (or first name) more often than the other networks, which causes "Barack" to be the third most common word.

Next, let's look at our favorite feuding TV hosts, Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly, and let's throw in Wolf Blitzer as well (left to right):

Olbermann	O'Reilly	Blitzer

The image is a bit damning for Bill O'Reilly - his coverage is far more singularly focused on Barack Obama than Keith Olbermann's is on McCain. Wolf Blitzer ends up around the media's average, which means he's skewed towards more (negative) coverage for Obama.

Next, let's look at Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, and Sean Hannity:

Cooper	Matthews	Hannity

Interestingly, it seems that both Anderson Cooper and Chris Matthews still like talking about Bill and/or Hillary Clinton fairly often in their election coverage, whereas Hannity doesn't.  (However, Fox News coverage does tend to include the Clintons a fair bit, as the overall image shows.)

Next, here are a few random ones by request.  First, here are the top 40 words in all of Lou Dobbs's coverage (not just election coverage):

Finally, here are the three networks' top terms when filtered for current war-related topics (iraq, gori, georgia, ossettia, putin, caucasus, soviet, russian, russia, pipeline, baghdad, surge, deployment, gates, rice, IED, suicide, hostage, insurgent):

CNN	MSNBC	Fox

If you'd like to try processing closed captioning text on your own, here's how I did it.  First, you need to extract and reformat the closed caption text, which is output from the Windows closed caption extraction tool:

cut -f 2 | dos2unix | sed 's/>> /\n/' | fmt

Next (optionally) you can search for content that is near a mention of Obama or McCain, to hone in on election-related coverage:

egrep -C 5 -i obama\|mccain

Next, you need to create a word frequency histogram, after filtering out unwanted garbage words (in a text file called garbage-words):

tr " " "\n" | tr -d ",.()[]\"" | ./toupper.py | sort | grep -v ":" | egrep -vix \"`cat garbage-words | tr "\n" "|"`\" | uniq -c | sort -n -r

Finally, you need to generate the word cloud images using Imagemagick:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, sys
from math import log

font = "Helvetica-Bold"
maxfontsize = 100
firstfontsize = 0

imagelist = ""

for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
    fields = line.strip().split()
    count = int(fields[0])
    word = fields[1].replace("'", "’")
    print "word ", word
    fontsize = int(pow(count,1.1) / 25)
   
    if firstfontsize == 0:
        firstfontsize = fontsize

    # scale font size relative to maxfontsize
    fontsize = int(float(fontsize) * float(maxfontsize) / float(firstfontsize))
       
    cmd = "convert -font " + font + " -pointsize " + str(fontsize) + " label:'" + word + "' " + "tmpimage." + word + ".png"
    os.system(cmd)
    imagelist = imagelist + "tmpimage." + word + ".png "

cmd = "convert -background white -gravity Center " + imagelist + "-append cloud. png"

os.system(cmd)
os.system("rm tmpimage*.*")

Are there other interesting studies that could be done with this data?

↑ Shrink post ↑

Two items to note.

1. In a follow up to the original LA Times story about the McCain Bury Brigade, the Digg CEO (predictably) denies any such thing. My take on his argument is that if he's right, then digg's algorithm is screwed up because in my experience, some of the most popular content ever to hit digg was buried. When it finally defeated the bury, it rose to the top. This has happened to me at least three times. So the McCain Bury Brigade might be quite small, but have great influence due to a faulty algorithm.
2. Case in point: BARACKY II, easily the best video of the campaign so far, was buried. A new digg has been set up here.

Some straight talk from Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films:

I wonder if Mary Matalin likes explaining why she decided to publish a smear job on Barack Obama written by a 9/11 truther who is spreading his lies through white supremacist radio shows.

This ad is running in Ohio, and like some of the other Obama ads, it wasn't announced to the media before it started airing.

For those of us who are political junkies, it's a bit maddening to not know exactly what the Obama campaign is up to, but we should take solace in the fact that it's got to be even more frustrating for the McCain campaign.

I just started watching Countdown (on DVR delay). Rachel Maddow is guest hosting, and it's amazing how much better she's getting, especially since she was pretty damn good when she started out.

This is a bit of a squishy observation, but the way I'd put it is that Maddow is now in full command of her presence. She seems totally comfortable and smooth, with the type of confidence you need to be a success on television.

She needs her own show -- even if only in the 10pm slot if MSNBC execs don't want to bump anyone out of the current lineup.

Updated with video.

Finally, a sequel that's even better than the original. The primaries are over...the general election is on!

digg_url = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fNgA5xLxao&eurl=http://www.jedreport.com/'; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_window = 'new';

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