Marc Ambinder contemplates the nature of bias in the media, quoting Jim Vandehei and John Harris:

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site–when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring–has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

VandeHarris is right.

Perfect example: Jake Tapper today points to campaign photography as an example of bias in the media; there are more flattering photos of Obama than there are of McCain.

He’s right to call out that atrocious photo of Cindy McCain (why run that?) but if McCain is simply much less photogenic than Obama, as one campaign photographer points out, then isn’t it fair and accurate to have less flattering photos of him in circulation? Going the extra mile to find more flattering photos of a less-photogenic candidate for the sake of balance is bias in itself.

To use an analogy from the sports world: you can’t accuse a sports writer of being biased against Barry Bonds because she writes more negative stories about Bonds than she does about Albert Pujols. Barry Bonds is a criminal and a dickhead, while Albert Pujols is a pretty alright dude. Bonds simply lends himself to more negative coverage.

Now, McCain isn’t quite the jerk Barry Bonds is, and he’s certainly not a criminal, but his candidacy has, by any objective measure, been much more lackluster than Obama’s. Why wouldn’t the coverage reflect that?

David Broder’s column this morning (McCain as Alpha Male) is premised on the following observation:

That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator — an impression reinforced by Obama’s frequent glances in McCain’s direction and McCain’s studied indifference to his rival.

Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

So McCain came off as the alpha male by…avoiding all eye contact with Barack Obama? Really?

This seems to be the exact inverse of what is actually observed in social animal psychology, from feces flingers to feudal farmers.

Does the king avoid eye contact with his peasants, or is it the other way around? Is the big hunky monkey compelled into social deference while totally banging the nerd monkey’s girlfriend, or vice versa?

TPM was initially on the case, providing this reality check from their resident monkey scientist (be this scientist of monkeys or monkey who is scientist I’m not positive):

I think people really are missing the point about McCain’s failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear–look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior–low ranking monkeys don’t look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

Why does it seem like Henry Paulson’s the guy Bruce Springsteen’s going to “do a little favor for” at the end of Atlantic City?

The US got some jobs and tried to put some money away, but we got debt that no honest man can pay.

Or is Paulson the chicken man? No no, cause the favor guy blew up the chicken man. So I guess maybe the chicken man is…Saddam Hussein?

And the DA who can’t get no relief? Bush? Maybe that’s too generous. And if Saddam is the chicken man, then it’s really Bush who’s the favor guy; or, at least I suppose, the Bush administration, proper (and thus, Paulson, too).

And the broad putting the makeup on, fixin’ her hair up pretty? I’m thinking…Canada.

Sarah Palin describes one of the great Alaskan ideas she’ll be bringing to Washington:

“We’re going to do a few new things also,” she said at a rally in Cedar Rapids. “For instance, as Alaska’s governor, I put the government’s checkbook online so that people can see where their money’s going. We’ll bring that kind of transparency, that responsibility, and accountability back. We’re going to bring that back to D.C.”

Great idea! If only someone had thought of this earlier!

Oh wait, someone already passed this into law. Some guy named Berock Osama. Or something.

I wonder what happened to him.

How infuriating/ironically hilarious is it to watch the McCain campaign completely politicize hurricane Gustav by making one big, on-message fuss about how much John McCain refuses to politicize hurricane Gustav?

All this while forcefully attacking Obama (during the hurricane) over Obama supposedly attacking McCain (during the hurricane).

How can anyone honestly argue that the experience gap between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin isn’t large?

Three years ago this month, Sarah Palin was in the middle of her tenure as mayor of a city of 8,000 people (a position to which she was first elected with 909 votes), while Barack Obama was inspecting Russian warhead destruction facilities with Dick Lugar, on his way toward passing sweeping weapons nonproliferation legislation.

There’s just no comparison here; Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama look like Colin Powell.

1. Mistress or Daughter? Or, er, VP Pick? I guess VP pick.

2. Sarah Palin has an entire section on Polar Bears in her Wikipedia profile.

3. Palin once had constitutional beef with Alaska State Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole, the Gentleman from Santa’s Workshop. (Is America ready for a VP on the naughty list?)

5. She apparently possesses a remarkable ability to autograph impossibly thin wooden dowels. A celebrity we can believe in.

6. Prior to this week, she and McCain were essentially complete strangers; they’d met once before and only spoken twice.

Once and twice! And he trusts her to lead the country, and, like, be the President? Of the country?

And we’re supposed to trust his quickie-rigged confidence in her quickie-assembled Presidential skills, when all we know about Sarah Palin is that she has beef with Santa and a strong associative connection to Polar Bears?

Never thought I’d miss the Mittster. : (

Bad pick, like a runny boogey.

Matt Yglesias sees politics as a zero-sum game (a popular blogospheric notion):

The idea that there can be “bad news” for Democrats but “worse news” for GOP betrays a basic failure to understand the nature of electoral politics, namely that it’s a zero-sum competition for power in which only one candidate can win any given race and only one party can hold a majority in any legislative body.

If new polls show public dissatisfaction with Democrats but greater dissatisfaction with Republicans, that’s good news for Democrats.

But I’m not so sure that’s necessarily true.

I imagine if we lived a world in which the Democratic congress had approval ratings in the mid 60s, we’d see a lot more moderate to moderate-leaning Republicans crossing over on key Dem legislation in order to get in on some of that love (ie, perhaps enough to override an S-CHIP veto).

The way things are now (with both parties hitting the mid 20s) there’s just no incentive.

Politics may be zero-sum in each election (one party wins and the other party loses) but not when it comes to actually legislating.

Which should kind of be, you know, the point of politics

So when, exactly, did we outlaw being a spoiled and/or obnoxious college student? (Perhaps Mike Nifong could volunteer an answer…):

I’m all for stunting some collegiate self-righteousness, but this seems to be a pretty clear-cut case of a handful of campus police officers needlessly escalating a pretty non-threatening situation.

Though apparently that’s not a universally held reaction:

To me it’s really very simple. When a police officer tells you to do something — you do it. To do otherwise is just asking the officer to show you that they aren’t kidding. This jerk was lucky he was only tased…I say Taser him again for the heck of it.

Well ok.

And so we’ve got endless sympathy for a handful of unfairly prosecuted jocks, whose only offense was hiring a black stripper and calling her a nigger a bunch of times, vs. mocking outrage towards an obnoxious campus newspaper columnist, guilty of nothing more than acting like a douche bag to John Kerry.

Doesn’t seem fair; how else is one supposed to act toward John Kerry?

This is awesome.

Stephen Bainbridge, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, really dislikes New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina’s role in the presidential nominating contest:

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President? The notion that the Ames straw poll matters would be preposterous were it not so pernicious.

He also seems to imply that contemporary South Carolinans are sympathetic to the mid-19th century political climate that resulted in South Carolina’s racist secession from the union (including, it would reason, the black majority that makes up the Democratic nominating class).

Bainbridge is upset his home state of California doesn’t have a larger pull over the nominating calendar, given that California’s “population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world!”

Which is exactly the reason California shouldn’t have a large role in the nomination process. The smallness of the early states is exactly why they work; candidates are forced into small-scale, retail campaigning, connecting with voters directly and in person in order to garner support.

A leading Californian primary, on the other hand, would take place entirely over the airwaves, via incredibly expensive advertisement and tabloid-baiting media stunts, thus eliminating whatever semblance of pure democracy we have left in the whole sorry system.

George Will finds a lot to dislike in Barack Obama’s opposition to the nomination of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, an opposition Will apparently sees as evidence of Obama’s (previously unacknowledged) propensity for race baiting and identity politics.

Obama had outlined his opposition to Southwick’s nomination three weeks ago, via a little noticed five-sentence press release, in which the Senator said:

Judge Southwick’s answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to excuse his disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.

As Will argues:

Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.

‘Tis true, though it shouldn’t be surprising that a Democrat of any persuasion, “new liberal” or not, would find it troubling that, in a caseload that large, “the law” never sided with a disenfranchised plaintiff. This type of populist suspicion of potential judicial activism really shouldn’t be seen as running counter to the “freshness” Obama brings to the table.

But that’s not really the problem; what is more disconcerting is the way in which Will uses this press release to paint Obama as some sort of race-baiting extremist, one more politician in a long line of tired liberal promoters of stale identity politics.

Will indicates that he had hoped Obama “would be impatient with the ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation that degrades racial discourse.” It’s odd, then, that, in attempting to determine whether or not Obama has lived up to this hope, Will concentrates on this minor press release (one expressing relatively routine Democratic opposition to a conservative Bush judicial nomination), while ignoring the many, much more bold, ways in which Obama has spoken with fresh candor on race and politics.

Barack Obama has suggested scaling back race-based Affirmative Action; he repeatedly emphasizes to black audiences the need for personal responsibility in struggling black communities, highlighting the “strong values and character component of educational achievement.” The catalog of column-worthy examples of Obama’s departure from the “ritualized choreography of synthetic indignation” is long and deep. And yet Will ignores them.

Not being able to paint Obama as an extremist using the Senator’s words alone, Will resorts to linking him to a series of unnamed “liberals,” expressing unattributed disagreeable positions:

To some of Southwick’s opponents, his merits are irrelevant. They simply say it is unacceptable that only one of the 17 seats on the 5th Circuit is filled with an African American, although 37 percent of Mississippians are black…. [B]ecause he is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness.

Nevermind that Obama has never expressed these views, nor that his press release only cites race as one of five areas of disenfranchisement he suspected the potential justice of being prejudiced against.

I suppose in Will’s view, any black politician opposing a White judicial nominee is nothing but a stale leftover of the “long-running and intensely boring melodrama” of the legacy of the civil rights movement.

If only Obama were to have the racial cojones to release some more paradigm-challenging five sentence press releases. Anything less than that is nothing more than Al Sharpton genuflection.