A couple of things really jumped out at me this weekend.

I was listening to some commentary from Juan Williams who considered the prospects of the general election in terms of Obama's presence, charisma and fluid speaking style--constrasting it with John McCain's, hunched, halting and ineloquent recent speech. For Williams, and I imagine for most liberals, its all about style. For me, and I imagine most conservatives, its all about substance. John McCain won the Republican nomination because for better or worse, he appeared to most voters as the most substantive candidate. If it was a matter of style, Huckabee would now be looking for a running mate.

Who wins this argument? I don't rightly know. Are more people fascinated with style or impressed with substance? The polls appear to suggest that substance still rules the day, but I concede the significant difference between polls and elections. My dread of an Obama presidency is similarly less about him and what he would do, and more a concern with whether America has lost its soul. If it really is an MTV country, we are all screwed.

The second thing concerned the backstory on Bitterquiddick. Mayhill Flower (...and its not a pen name...) is a blogger, and not a particularly well-known one at that. She nevertheless has produced two earth-shaking scoops. The first of course was Obama's characterization of middle America as bitter and irrational, clinging to guns and religion rather than worshipping at the altar of the omnipotent state. The second was Bill Clinton's bitter, and perhaps understandable harangue of the editors of Vanity Fair, who last week published rumors of unabated promiscuity on the campaign trail.

She recounts how she got the Obama scoop.

In April, Fowler asked a friend who raises money for Obama if she could attend a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco. "I've given the max to the campaign," she reminded the friend.

Fowler had her tape recorder going when the candidate made his ill-fated remarks about frustrated small-town residents turning to guns, God or anti-immigrant sentiments. The woman who had viewed Obama as a unifier was taken aback.

"I thought, he really doesn't understand these people, and he's confirming the worst stereotype this audience has of these people, and that's something I've been fighting against since I moved to California in 1968."

When Fowler quickly posted some other Obama remarks, about what he wanted in a running mate, her fundraising friend called and scolded her. But Fowler was still wrestling with the "bitter" comments. She played the tape for her husband, Jim, who didn't think it was a big deal. But Fowler says she knew it would be "devastating" to Obama.

Lets analyze.

It becomes apparent that she got the story because she looked harmless--an Obama contributor blogging for an Obama-friendly forum. Similarly, she got the Clinton rant because he thought she was simply a supporter.

Hurrah for the good guys, i.e. bloggers, but several things about the Obama episode in particular were very, very disturbing on the broad cultural level.

When Michel, her supervisor, called to ask what else was on the tape, Fowler said there was more newsworthy audio but that she was not going to provide it. They fell into an hour-long discussion about the nature of journalism.

"It's ultimately your decision," Michel recalls saying. "But if you decide not to share it, and you make the decision only to publish what you believe favors Barack Obama, you put me in an impossible position as an editor."

On a flight the next day, "at 32,000 feet, the piece just appeared in my head," Fowler says. But she decided not to submit it for two more days, figuring that if the story appeared in the Huffington Post on Friday it would be "buried" over the weekend -- a common tactic for politicians trying to minimize unfavorable news.

1. Obama's audience is so bigoted and ignorant--which of course means the same thing, that they simply did not recognize the gravity of Obama's remarks because it was already an article of faith with them.

2. The second possibility is considerably worse--the audience understood that Obama's remarks were bigoted, hateful and ignorant and didn't necessarily agree, but decided to enter a conspiracy of silence about the candidate's real attitudes in order to obtain political advantages for themselves at the expense of the whole nation.

That is uncomfortably close to the political climate that existed before the civil war, where political divisions served to dehumanize fellow citizens to the point where it became possible to engage in fratricide.

UPDATE: Walter Shapiro from the liberal New Republic:

Through most of his inaugural primetime press conference, Barack Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. The president's response to the first question from the Associated Press about the risks of sounding too apocalyptic about the economy ran (or, to be more accurate, crawled) for nearly 1,200 words--and ended with Obama saying "Okay" with an implicit question mark as if he were requesting permission to keep on talking. A national poll from the Pew Research Center released Monday afternoon found that 92 percent of Americans described Obama as a "good communicator." There is a suspicion that those astronomic numbers had dipped by the time that Obama exited from the East Room of the White House at 9 p.m. on the dot.

I had a long discussion with a former neighbor yesterday who insisted that the media will carry Obama on its shoulders to reelection. Well, you know me--I disagree, even vehemently. Shapiro's ambivalence is my currency.

Fabius Maximus enters once more into the breach to try to see what kind of news media will arise from the wreckage of the past 10 years.

The major news media are on a treadmill. Loss of credibility shrinks their audience, hence less revenue, hence reduced funding. Which reduces the quality of their product, hence even less audience. Worse is the loss of advertisers to new media (e.g., Craigslist and Google), which means less revenue, less funding for news collection, and smaller audiences.

I think I've gained a new perspective on news, living as I do, in my self-imposed "low information" universe.

What Fabius doesn't consider is whether we actually need anything to replace the old news media model at all.

Out of a fascination with the carrion bird convergence on the corpse of Michael Jackson, I watched and read some news this week and it was like visiting one's home after a long absence--I saw things I had never really paid attention to.

Out of the hundreds of hours of Michael Jackson coverage, many facts emerged--well, not many, but a handful nonetheless. Jackson was a half billion dollars in debt, which is fascinating, but not really relevant unless you loaned him money. His children were fathered by white men, which is admittedly curious, but pretty much useless information. Anything else? Probably, but just as irrelevant as the rest of it. It seems that I found out everything I needed to know in a fifteen second announcement on the radio while I was driving to Moab last weekend--Michael Jackson, dead at 50.

Its amazing to contemplate the scale of irrelevant coverage with respect to the actual useful news it was based on, and sobering to realize how little we'd miss if the legacy news media suddenly went dark.

Now consider the news coming out of Washington D.C. these days. Sarah Palin announces her resignation and everyone spends the next few days analyzing what she really meant and what the real motivations were. Governor Palin is a pretty straightforward gal, but she operates in a business where no one says what they mean and nothing is as it seems. Have you ever really believed that someone resigned to spend more time with their family?

The useful news in this case was that Sarah Palin had resigned. Everything else was pure conjecture. Once again a case of fifteen seconds of information being spun into several hundred hours of "coverage".

We simply don't need 99.999% of the so-called news that we currently get, and what we do need we get through our social networks. I had several texts about Michael Jackson's death, and saw many comments on Facebook--every single one of them had exactly as much real information in them as I saw from the so-called professional news media. I learned of Sarah Palin's resignation from a Facebook post by Mitt Romney's Facebook group. Information finds you these days--no one has to go looking for it.

I think what people are really saying when the mull over the future of the news media is, "How will the power elite influence the thinking of the nation's citizens without the near universal access they had with the old mass media?"

Things are tough all over.

The future of the news mass media is that it has no future. People are going to get their news the old fashioned way--mouth to ear, but they are going to do it using very high-tech equipment. The vestiges of the old regime will be on-line wonk redoubts (like this one!) where small audiences can read analysis and "expert" opinion.

I'm OK with that.

My experiment in low information living has revealed a couple of interesting dynamics. In spite of not reading a paper, watching cable news or surfing the blogs, I've still been getting the news. What I've been hearing and how I've been hearing it is the key to understanding why the Obama administration is at war with Fox News.

I'm getting the "news" from my friends, who are often getting it from their friends, who may or may not be getting it from a "legitimate" news source. I recently saw a post on my Facebook page of a political nature and out of curiosity, I decided to trace it back to its origins. Turns out that it was reposted three times before it found me with over 3,000 friends in the direct audience. I can't even begin to calculate how many other people got this "news" outside of the Facebook loop. Pretty impressive.

What is suggests in an incredible multiplier effect for media outlets like Fox News (or for that matter, MSNBC). The average audience for a prime-time Fox show is between a half-million and two million, but with the multiplier effect, the national reach is undoubted measured in the tens of millions, perhaps north of 100 million.

Its not only the word-of-mouth methodology for communicating the news, but what finally gets communicated.

A good example of this is the White House's exclusion of Fox from an interview with one of Obama's commissars. I found this distinctly amusing because of the role reversal. The incident, as reported, simply reinforced impressions a lot of people already had of the White House--impressions that they created with their statements about Fox and attempts to coerce other media outlets to boycott Fox stories. The goose-stepping sinestrosphere seethed with anger over the "unfairness" of the story, spinning various details into an exoneration.

A useless reaction, because all that got through the pipe was "White House denies Fox access to administration official".

Ultimately, in spite of our technology, we haven't progressed much beyond the medieval village in terms of our so-called journalism. Its still basically over-the-fence gossip that feeds the villagers biases. Politicians use that dynamic to advance their agendas, but they also get hoisted on their own petards.

I'm just happy that conservatives are learning to play the game.

He added: "Let’s face facts. A business model that assumes we can’t charge for the content we produce assumes that our content has no value in the online market.

Dow Jones encompasses the Wallstreet Journal, which does charge for on-line content, and makes a profit doing so.

"In pure economic terms, such a business model has to mean one of two things: Either there is no demand for the content or there are substitute suppliers of that content sufficient to drive the price almost to zero."

Ar-r-r-r, there's the rub!

For days at this points, I've been hearing serious conjecture about what is going on with Tiger Woods, and what was really behind a one-car accident on his own property. Someone should pay me to read this crap.

I've yet to see any mention of the East Anglia University smoking-gun emails that prove definitively that climate scientists have been bought off by social engineering interests. Where is the Peter Galbraith story about he and Joe Biden shilling for Kurd independence in exchange for a piece of the Iraqi oil action? Now those stories would have had value.

On the other hand, who might see value in keeping that information out of the papers and nightly newscasts?

Right.

Les Hinton blames "digital thieves" for the state of the newspaper industry today, but the reality is starting them right in the face. As the broadcast networks and cable news channels were breaking the news of the State Dinner party crashers, image after image of elite media notables flashed by, escorting their mates and dates across the red carpet. One has to wonder if a reporter who really did their job would be invited to the White House...I suspect they wouldn't be.

The problem isn't that the content doesn't have value, but that newspapers offer that value to their political masters rather than to their subscribers.

Chris Christie confronts the New Jersey press:

I don't think I've ever seen a reaction to a politician like I witnessed with Sarah Palin. My wife and her friends were instantly captivated, and the left went absolutely bonkers, desperately trying to mitigate Palin's charismatic effect.

Perhaps no one manifests this obsession more prominently than Andrew Sullivan, who insisted that Trig, the Palin's Down syndrome son, was actually the child of the Palin's oldest daughter Bristol. Sullivan's evidence are three photographs where Palin doesn't appear to be eight months pregnant, and the fact that she was in labor 26 hours with her fifth child.

On the other hand, Sullivan never deals with a couple of major exculpatory facts, like Bristol Palin was already pregnant when Trig was born (Trig was born April 18, his nephew was born December 29th of the same year), and young women Bristol's age have about a one in 1250 chance of having a Down syndrome baby, while women older in 44 have a one in 25 chance.

Whatever the actual facts surrounding Trig birth, the main question for sane folks is, "why do we care?" Frankly I can't even imagine a scenario where it would make sense to fake a pregnancy and then surreptitiously adopt a Down syndrome baby.

The issue has "loser" written all over it, but Sullivan has doggedly maintained his indignant demeanor in spite of criticism by both right and left, and two years later, he's still insistent that he's the only fair-minded 'journalist' in the country and takes his liberal-progressive brethren to task for not backing him up.

Remember all those liberals and lefties huffily denouncing this blog's attempts to make sense of Sarah Palin's bizarre stories about the pregnancy and birth of her alleged fifth child? I was nuts, crazy, vile, disgusting, etc etc to indulge in what Dave Weigel, with no working knowledge of the story, calls "nonsense." You may also recall that the liberal media didn't touch this with a barge-pole - and still hasn't (apart from a NYT puff-piece that I found utterly credulous at the time). Newsweek has even put its entire reputation behind the details of the story as outlined in Going Rogue, without doing any independent reporting on the subject.

Ironically, the cold-shoulder has useful if for no other reason than to have Sullivan write this about his ideological confreres.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever. And people wonder how this farce of a candidate now controls one major political party and could well be our next president. One reason is that we do not have a functioning adversarial media uncorrupted by partisan loyalty and tactics.

The "Whose baby is he really" story is boring and irrelevant, but everything else about its coverage is fascinating, particularly the revelation that Andrew Sullivan is deeply irrational--not simply because his obsession with Trig Palin is pathological, but because in the same column, he criticizes the liberal media's herd instinct while at the same time expressing anger and disappointment that he was unable to stampede them on the story.

...and they wonder why no one listens to Air American or reads liberal magazines and newspapers.

Newsweek's upcoming issue:

Obviously an artifact of deep frustration by the left that they haven't been able to manage Obama's image to their liking, but I've been perplexed at their incredulity that this is happening to the Messiah--after all, Messianic messengers tend to end their careers on the run, in a prison or at the hands of executioners--sometimes all three.

What's become clear over the transition between the Bush and Obama administration is that while everyone would like to manipulate public opinion, everyone basically runs into the same problem. You can incite a mob to form, but you can't control it--and its collorary--one mob begets another.

60s anti-war protesters recreated their organizing techniques in the new millenia, using modern communication technologies to great effect, which in turn were the basis for the Tea Party's birth. In both cases, the elite's control of the traditional messaging apparatus was circumvented with the technological equivalent of a jungle telegraph.

Just as the ruling class thought they had co-opted new media with secret collaborations like journolist (among many others...), a true high-tech jungle telegraph emerged in the form of Facebook.

Something happened last week that turned the light-bulb on. An old friend I recently reconnected with on Facebook asked me a simple, but pregnant question: "Where do you get this stuff?"

She had unquestioningly accepted the mainstream media narrative for decades, only to discover an entire alternate universe of reporting and perspective in the minimalistic but regular postings on my Facebook page. What contributed to her awakening was the credibility of my sources (the page A-12 stuff the media prints but hopes you never read...) and the fact that it wasn't necessary to establish trust. Trust is implicit in the nature of our relationship.

Almost everyday, one of my Facebook friends reposts at least one of the articles that I've posted, suggesting an organic process of transmission that mathematically portends a reach far broader than anything the mainstream media could hope to accomplish directly. The great thing about this (depending on your point of view) is that I function as editor--deciding what pages page one, and what doesn't.

The bottom line is that there is virtually no way to hijack this particular jungle telegraph. You may wring your hands that nearly 20% of the public thinks the President is a Muslim, but there is literally nothing you can do about it because Obama has neither the trust or the access to effectively repudiate the claim.

The implications for future administrations are challenging to say the least.

Much is being written these days about the end of a distinction between public and private behavior. Google's CEO went so far as to suggest that a few years hence will see a strong trend towards legal name changes, as young people seek to escape their socially networked misspent youth for professional and political reasons. His larger message is important--technology has erased the traditional expectation of a public and private face. We will now only have one face and in all likelihood, the worse thing we've ever done will be the first thing people learn about us.

There is no reason to expect that this won't also be true for the political sphere as well and we are in fact seeing this in real time. The failure of the global warming hoax can be attributed to the impossibility of controlling information thoroughly enough to see such a monstrosity fully translated into national and international law. The incredibly aggressive effort to ram through Obamacare became a Pyrrhic victory, and a likely temporary Pyrrhic victory at its alleged benefits will be as illusory as the economic rebirth promised by the so-called stimulus.

Politicians may have to do something unprecedented--sell their propositions on the merits.

It am struck by the incredible frequency one encounters delusions of grandeur among bloggers these days.

Certainly there is always a certain amount of ego that goes into writing an unsolicited opinion for public consumption, but what I'm talking about approaches mental illness. Consider the example of Conor Friedersdorf.

Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic is adding a major name to the masthead with news that Conor Friedersdorf is joining the blog as a “senior editor.” In addition to Friedersdorf, Sullivan is adding a new staffer–Zoe Pollock–to focus on behinds-the-scene work and to some “underblogging.”

Friedersdorf, a former Sullivan intern, has made a name for himself over the last two years as one of the most promising conservative writers and thinkers. He writes at the American Scene, Forbes, Daily Beast, and the late True/Slant and was involved in the well-thought of, but failed, Culture 11.His take-downs of Mark Levin and Andrew Breitbart, as well as concern over conservatism’s “narrative” problem have given him a major following and reputation.

Making a name for himself? Major reputation and following? First consider that the audience for political blogs is miniscule. The most successful blogs get between 50-200,000 readers a day, although that's arguable considering the ambiguity of the accounting. By comparison, a total loser of a show on cable, say Hardball, gets 300-400,000 a show. A nightly news cast gets between 5-8 million viewers and Rush Limbaugh gets 12-25 million listeners a day.

I'm one of the rare people who reads political blogs, and I've never heard of Conor Friedersdorf, so what 'name' has the guy made for himself? Well apparently its not how many people read you, its which people. Clearly Andrew Sullivan, who is almost as obscure as Friedersdorf is in the grand scheme of things, has read him and remarked on the quality of his work. Note that the left are always impressed when people agree with them--I assume because it's so uncommon.

From the ridiculous to the complete insanity.

Bill Jacobson (among others) wonders aloud why a blog would require a Senior Editor, and what the hell does a Senior Editor do on a blog?

...Friedersdorf's self description has to be the most overrated job description in the history of humankind:

Over at The Daily Dish, where I am a senior editor, my boss Andrew Sullivan ...

This raises several important questions:

• The Daily Dish is just a blog at The Atlantic; why does The Daily Dish need a "Senior Editor"?
• The only reason anyone reads The Daily Dish is to read what Andrew Sullivan has to say; why does The Daily Dish need a "Senior Editor"?
• Does Andrew Sullivan really think he can brand The Daily Dish?
• Is there a Junior Editor, and if so, why does The Daily Dish need a "Senior Editor"?
• What exactly does the Senor Editor of The Daily Dish edit?
• If the Senior Editor of The Daily Dish fell in the woods, would anyone notice?
• Why doesn't Friedersdorf list his position as Senior Editor of The Daily Dish on his LinkedIn page? (Quick, tell Greg Sargent and TPM - scandal!)
• Friedersdorf uses the phrase "where I am a senior editor," which implies that there may be other Senior Editors. Multiply these questions by the number of times Sarah Palin has been mentioned at The Daily Dish, then divide by the projected national budget deficit, then multiply by the number of Senior Editors of The Daily Dish, and I'm pretty sure you get Pi.

I can't help but notice the similarity to government bureaucracies, where grandiose titles also abound. Part of the culture I guess.

The Daily Beast announced a merger with Newsweek, the money-hemorrhaging news magazine sold for one dollar to HI FI magnate Sydney Harman.

The 50/50 merger suggests the obvious--The Daily Beast is also worth about a dollar.

The Daily Beast has been losing readership. Research firm Compete says the number of unique visitors to the TheDailyBeast.com has dropped from 2.18 million in June to 1.55 million in September -- a fall of nearly 30%. Rival Huffington Post has 12.2 million unique visitors. Newsweek relies heavily on MSNBC.com for online traffic; it is not certain whether that will continue after the merger.

Ironically, the Daily Beast believes it can improve its fortunes by creating a print edition, which may explain its affinity for Newsweek.

Print. Really?

One of the inescapable realities of the modern media dynamic is that readers can move from website to website in a click, the effect of which is that we don't go to a single source for news (which is what a print news magazine is...) but visit a site because a particular article has drawn our attention. In effect, the current model is networked, distributed and diverse, not concentrated, homogeneous and brand-loyal.

Ironically, while the Beast is floundering, even on-line news magazines deemed 'successful' are far from being profitable. Politico, Huffington Post and Pajamas Media are all heavily subsided by wealth patrons.

A merger is not a bad idea, but let's face it--print is dead. The merger should be between on-line media and cablenews. That's some serious synergy.

Sometime back, my wife and I stopped at a gas station and went inside to buy a couple of fountain drinks. My wife noticed and bought some Mexican cookies called 'galetas'. What was initially delight started to disturb her as the implications of Mexican cookies at a Texaco dawned on her. How many Mexican immigrants are there in the area that a gas station finds it profitable to stock Mexican products?

More on this later.

Esquire is a 'men's magazine', which of course means that no actual 'real' men read it. Are you a real man? Do you read the magazine? No? I rest my case. This of course really pisses off the left-wing, vaguely effete men who write articles for Esquire and similarly obscure publications. They are all so damn smart, and nobody but their Moms and girlfriends listen to what they have to say!

Like all good Progressives steeped in the Rules for Radicals, this amorphous dissatisfaction and anger needs are target, and who better than a fat, bald senior citizen who has been eating their lunch for thirty years and more?

Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?

An exclusive and unbiased investigation into the highly paid operative of a foreign-born tycoon, a man who reengineered political and media culture and fomented a revolt that threatens the very stability of our country

I read that paragraph and thought that the article might be satirical, but the general rule is that satire is supposed to make other people look foolish, not the satirist.

So who is this … Roger Ailes, if he's not who he says he is — if he's not an average American? Well, the short answer is this: He is not only a man who has spent his entire life thinking of ways to win; he is a man who has spent his entire life winning. Nothing wrong with that, of course: America loves a winner. But let's be honest here: We're all average Americans. Does any of us win all the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn't be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America," the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News ("Obama sux" edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?

After I read this, I figured out that the article is kind of a Rohrsach test. Progressives will totally get that there is some sort of criticism implied here, while the rest of us will be thinking, "...what the hell is the problem?"

The strangest 'hit piece' I've ever read and if I were Roger Ailes, I'd be pretty happy with the product. I suspect Esquire is pretty happy too, judging from the linkage the article is getting.

Think about this for a minute--the liberal media is now doing stories about conservative icons to boost their circulation. Who could they, would they, write about on the left that would draw as much attention? Well, you would first have to find yourself a successful liberal-progressive celebrity with the kinds of achievements Ailes has had over his career. Anyone come to mind? No one? Me either.

Well there is Barack Obama, but the journalist who sold their souls for access have been finding the market a little soft for their books. Two years of epic fail will do that.

Esquire articles about Roger Ailes is Mexican cookies. Interest in somebody like Roger Ailes would be normal in say, Alabama, but finding Roger in Esquire or Sarah in the New Yorker is one of those things that shouldn't be there, but is and suddenly you realize the world has changed.

Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

So asserts Media Matters, a purely partisan operation notorious for 'making stuff up'.

The source is of course, anonymous, but I liked this part the best.

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” says the source. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

Oh. One has to be able to hear the dog whistle...

“Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn’t ‘news,’ they didn’t care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything—anything--that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is.”

Hmmm. So Fox plays it straight with new content, but takes liberties with non-news, i.e commentary. I'm shocked. That might explain why I occasionally see Sean Hannity as well as that maniac Glenn Beck on the channel.

More non-news at eleven...

Rep Anthony Weiner is learning something important about the media.

It takes a certain type of woman to set his heart a-Twitter.

Rep. Anthony Weiner follows only a select 198 of his nearly 49,000 Twitter fans -- and a surprising number of them are total babes.

Yesterday, outside his DC office, the model-loving, married congressman testily refused to talk about the pretty women he's following.

His refusal has had the opposite effect that he imagined. Weinergate has jumped into the mainstream with the Today show picking it up this morning.

Meanwhile, across town, Sarah Palin demonstrates not just an understanding of the media, but skill in manipulating it to her ends. She can see revenge from her house...

There is nothing the U.S. media wants more than something it thinks it can't have. Hence the power of news leaks that manipulate the thrust of their initial presentation. Hard-to-get is a rigid rule of human behavior. Ask any teenage boy or girl.

And there are few things more sweet to Palin and her fervent supporters cheering their TV sets this week than the image of a hungry know-it-all "lamestream media" caravan of 15 or more vehicles traipsing along behind her red-white-and-blue bus enroute to they-know-not-where to do they-know-not-what.

To make it worse, each one of the frustrated, confused chasers knows that Fox News' Greta Van Susteren is....
...riding along with the not-yet-and-possibly-never Republican presidential candidate, filing exclusive conversations for her audience to gobble up that only enhance Palin's already million-dollar value to FNC. Can you hear the teeth grinding? While Palin smiles and waves away?

The day's best line came from a CBS News producer who tried to claim that the lack of information from Palin's lumbering bus was endangering the dozen competing media vehicles trailing behind, uninvited.

So when you run for public office, remember to stiff-arm them when you need them most, and embrace them when you like them least.

One more thing to know, although this will not be in your control--when you are in trouble and the media is hounding you, pray to the demon Gods that they will be distracted by some other scandal.

Barney Franks is cruising Boston right now, looking for a virgin he can sacrifice...