Four Days

The "understatement of the year in a newswire headline" award goes to:

"Bad News Dogs Bush As Election Nears" - AP

It's a little reminiscent of Casablanca. The AP is "shocked, shocked" to discover to President being attacked by the media on the eve of the election.

What's worse is the examples. Why is this even a story? It's called editing.

In the vein of biased media, today's must read column is Thomas Sowell's bit about journalistic integrity in Townhall. Check it out,

The question is not whether the media should express opinions or give editorial endorsements favoring one candidate or another. The issue is whether their main function -- supplying information to the public -- is corrupted by double standards in how they report or withhold news that could help or hurt their favorite causes and candidates.

Indeed.

There's an interesting piece at the New Republic about voter access by Peter Beinart. His position is that access to voting should be easy and argues that conservatives view easy access to voting as a bad thing since it leads to decision making by uninformed masses. It's not by any means a hatchet piece on conservatives. He states,

As a liberal, I think conservatives are wrong: Voting should be easy. If easier access to the polls produces a little fraud and a lot more participation, it's worth it. It's worth it not because new voters will make thoughtful decisions at the voting booth but because, by bringing them into the political process, we have a chance of transforming them into the kind of voters who will.

Except that Beinart is wrong. Base10 recalls some studies of compulsory voting systems in Switzerland indicated a sharp rise in "noise" in the results due to an increase in random voting. It's like selecting a President by coin-flip.

Another great piece by Charles Krauthammer. Apparently, Afghanistan is becoming the other "forgotten war." As he puts it,

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban. President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted.

Enough for now. But check this out from Lileks yesterday.

NEXT. Live blogging from Baltimore!
- posted by Base10 @ 7:27 AM