No wonder he's losing! As was revealed in the Washington Post recently, John McCain's remote Arizona ranch features a lovely Verizon cell phone tower. Cindy, it turns out, asked for a tower back a couple years back. Verizon, remembering the Senator's wonderful work on behalf of the telecommunications industry during his time on the Commerce Committee, spent two years investigating the environmental and commercial impact of placing a permanent cell tower on the Senator's land, far, far, far away from anyone else who might benefit from it. Cindy says she asked for no special treatment, but the fact that Verizon's internal map of the area refers to it as "John McCain's ranch" suggests she may have been receiving it regardless. But this is the real story: while researching the environment impact of the tower, Verizon turned up evidence of an ancient Indian burial ground on McCain's property! Sort of! As Josh Green explains it:

You know what is weird and fascinating and taking up a great deal of our time today? Watching old episodes of The Daily Show from Election 2000. Jon Stewart was so young! And marginally less outraged all the time! (Though it is quite clear that the 2000 election shifted him with surprising speed from the sarcastic MTV alt-comedian of the '90s to the sarcastic outraged cataloger of horrors that he is today.) (Also Stephen Colbert was an amazing performer even then.) So check up on the depressing third debate between Al Gore and George Bush! Or watch with us the prescient "negative campaigning" debate between Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, after the jump. And weep for your lost youth! Click to view

A couple years ago, the CIA was instructed by the Justice Department to waterboard and torture all the al-Qaeda members they secretly detained in illegal prisons. But the CIA got a bit worried! Because, you see, administrations come and go, but the CIA is forever. They've become quite skilled as ass-covering. So they pressured the White House to give written policy approval of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Why? So they could leak the memo to the Washington Post in case someone like Condi Rice tried the "it was all the CIA's idea and we knew nothing" line. Which she did! Condi told Congress last month that the Bush administration was "initially uneasy about a controversial CIA plan for interrogating top al-Qaeda suspects." She says she asked someone to look into whether the torturing was legal or not. But the CIA remembers it differently.

If John McCain and his campaign want to play the guilt by association card, the Dems just might have them beat. Sure, Barack Obama palled around with terrorists, but McCain is hiring Saddam Hussein's cronies! It's true! Investigative reporter Murray Waas reports that the guy hired to lead McCain's presidential transition team (what a wonderful job! huge salary and you don't have to do anything) is a lobbyist who once helped lobby for the Iraqi dictator back in the 1990s. It is a long and complicated story but the gist is that McCain's guy worked with two other lobbyists who later pleaded guilty to acting as unregistered agents of Hussein's government and Timmons pretended he didn't know what they were doing but he totally did. So therefore McCain gassed his own people and we need to invade him ASAP. [HuffPo]

This is the official end of the Bush Administration. Yes, he'll hang around the Oval Office for another couple months, but it's over. It's done. Everyone get to work on your obits! What happened today that finally signaled the end of the era? Bush surrendered, completely, to the reality-based community. Ron Suskind, whose work chronicling the Bush administration has basically been the best political journalism of the last eight years, is responsible for that legendary phrase. In a 2004 piece for the New York Times Magazine, Suskind quoted an unnamed Bush aide (Rove?) as saying this:

Nationally, Barack Obama is between 5 and 10 points ahead in the polls. In the states defined by Rasmussen as battlegrounds, Obama ranges from a tie in North Carolina (North Carolina!) to slight leads in all the rest of them. Also Bush announced the nationalization of the banks or something today, prompting the Dow to jump in early trading. So Matt Drudge, who controls your news with an iron opera glove, is leading today with the news that ACORN registered Mickey Mouse to vote. Ha ha ha. Honestly, what the hell's the deal with the ACORN story and why are right-wingers already clinging to it like guns and religion? Sigh. We'll try to explain. What is ACORN?? An evil group that exists to organize poor people into a violent militia and overthrow the government via "voting." Or basically a lobbying group for low- and middle-income families, either one. Oh no, lobbyists! Right? ACORN is in some respects a lobbying group like, say, the oil or pharmaceutical lobbies. Except they represent poor people instead of profitable corporations so they're a much less successful lobbying group. What do they do? They started as a radical group dedicated to getting welfare recipients and underemployed non-welfare recipients together to demand socialist things like free lunches for kids and emergency room care. Now they lobby Democrats for terrorist things like raising the minimum wage and forcing the government to subsidize affordable housing. Also they organize voter registration drives. But what about all these crimes they're committing?? ACORN pays local losers in Florida $8 an hour to gather 20 voter registrations a day. So some of these losers are lazy, like all employees, and just make up the registrations. ACORN does try to find these made-up registrations and fire the employees who submit them, but, you know, sometimes they miss a couple. Also the law seems to say that ACORN has to submit all the registrations they gather no matter what, and even though the law is a little bit vague, they're still trying to follow it. Why do Republicans need to attack and delegitimize a damn voter registration drive?? Because a certain amount of passive voter suppression is built in to the Republican campaign strategy. If all the disenfranchised and disenchanted voters were organized and registered and informed, we'd probably be a crazy socialist 10-party country like Italy or something. The GOP engages in active voter suppression—voter ID laws and legal challenges—and the more passive kind built into the democratic process, like engendering cynicism about the democratic process. Obviously convincing the guys who disagree with you to not vote is part of any party's campaign strategy, but the GOP's by necessity targets poor people and minorities, and the vast history of suppressing the votes of poor people and minorities is way grosser than any history of disenfranchising white protestants. To us! Maybe you have some totally oppressed landed gentry in your family tree so you may feel differently. Quite honestly the very heart of the utter bullshitness of this anti-ACORN campaign can be found in one incredibly telling quote from a spokesman for the RNC: "Cairncross accused ACORN of engaging in a 'systematic effort to undermine the election process' through its voter-registration drives." Do you see the problem with that statement? And basically there is a CERTAIN CLASS of Republican voter that does not think that the poors, the Blacks, the homelesses, and so on honestly really deserve the same power to choose our rulers as a guy who's worked his whole life to get where he is. The politics of resentment are the last, most powerful weapon the McCain campaign has left this cycle. The details of the charges don't matter, actual proof of fraud doesn't matter, any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud being a real problem with a measurable effect on elections certainly doesn't matter, because the "fraud" is just that, you know, no-good hoodlum welfare recipients are being handed voter registration forms, and one type of person sees that as the point of democracy and the other type sees it as an utter perversion of democracy. Didn't McCain used to totally be in the tank for ACORN? Well Republicans have been bitching about ACORN and voter fraud for years now, but McCain definitely didn't used to be one of those Republicans. In 2006 McCain did give a keynote address, about immigration rights, at a rally co-sponsored by ACORN. Can you maybe use a little more false equivalence to explain this in a way I understand? Sure. ACORN's voter registration drives are to conservatives what Diebold voting machines are the liberals. The possibility of abuse is present and clear, but no one's yet convincingly proved that any abuse has occurred. OK so what's up with everyone suddenly talking about ACORN? As we said, nuttier conservatives have been on the ACORN-bashing bandwagon for years now. That it's finally trickled up to Drudge and Fox means they're scared they're losing the election and they need to preemptively delegitimize Obama. What are my talking points for when crazy relatives argue that ACORN stole the election? What we're dealing with so far is minor voter registration fraud. The questionable registrations number in the double digits in most states, and most of them have been flagged and caught by either ACORN themselves or election officials. Furthermore in many places the false registrations are required by law to be submitted anyway, so that ACORN isn't guilty of, say, tossing out the forms of Republicans they sign up. They do try to flag the fake ones as fake, but regardless, the fake ones are still being caught. Also: voter registration fraud does not coherently lead to voter fraud, because if you register one man 75 times, how will he vote 75 times, exactly? More importantly, the election can't be stolen if it hasn't happened yet, and voter registration fraud does not explain in any way a double digit lead for a candidate in national tracking polls. Like, wtf, how are you making this argument, are you slow? ACORN registering Mickey Mouse is why Barack Obama is up 12 in Pennsylvania? Ok, sure, whatever you say.

Lies! Today, they spread everywhere instantly thanks to the internet, that wondrous web of computers full of lies. That's how a fake rumor about Steve Jobs having a heart attack can momentarily cost Apple billions of dollars in market cap. But don't blame the internet—blame the inherently wicked hearts of mankind. Because people have been running these same types of media scams to manipulate financial markets for at least 144 years:

NBC political correspondent Andrea Mitchell is one of the network's news stars, so it's only natural that we've been seeing a lot of her lately. Even when the topic turns to the government's and the candidates' responses to the current financial crisis. But you will not see her, supposedly, when the discussion turns to "past economic decisions" that led up to the crisis. Because Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman who many say is basically responsible for the housing bubble. And that is their conflict of interest compromise: Mitchell will report as usual until the reasons we got to this point are discussed, at which point she'll quietly disappear from your television without explanation. Unethical! Or, you know, the standard way of doing business in political journalism. DC is an incestuous town and everyone knows and is basically friends with everyone else. The media-political complex has lots and lots of intermarried "journalists" and "operatives" and everyone has politely agreed to assume that everyone else is totally professional about it. So they get a bit tetchy when the Columbia Journalism Review is all "disclose your relationships or just be more independent or something" because what do those kids know? If Tom Brokaw wants to play golf with John McCain that is his business (note: we don't know if John McCain can play golf but the two are still definitely probably friends). The standard argument is that one has to find concrete evidence of "bias" before one can claim these chummy relationships are no good, but honestly the "bias" is so ingrained in the process that it's a useless task and one is best served by appyling a gimlet-eyed suspicion to everyone one sees on the TV and then voting for Ron Paul.

The McCain campaign is stirring up something dark and vicious in the national psyche. The economic meltdown that's killing their campaign is also aiding it's rageful death rattle—people are scared, uneasy, and increasingly pissed off. McCain rallies sound this close to turning violent. (Pictured: McCain winces slightly after an audience member calls Obama "a terrorist.") "Responsible" Republicans are weirded out. Irresponsible ones think they can stir the folks up just enough to win this sucker and then we'll all go back to being polite. Fat fucking chance. Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us of the anger of Jerry Falwell and "legitimate" right-wing attacks on activists like Dr. King:

Immediately after his inauguration as president in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt instituted a four-day bank holiday during which insolvent institutions were closed and the survivors were given a federal seal of approval. According to Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the big economies are discussing a similarly drastic move, a closure of world markets, hopefully temporary. There's one big difference.

So. The economy's tanking, banks are failing, we're heading into a recession, an unpopular president is finishing his 2nd disastrous term with historic disapproval ratings, and we're fighting overseas. There must be a historical precedent, right? Right? Plenty of professional pundit people seem to think so! But which year is it? 1932? 1992? 1968?? Let's examine the facts: 1932 Sez Who? Writing in The Nation (natch), "Superintendent" Charmers Johnson sez this year just might be a "'realigning election,' of which there have been only two during the past century—the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and of Richard Nixon in 1968." Why now? "First, the weakness (and age) of the Republican candidate may perhaps indicate that the Party itself is truly at the end of a forty-year cycle of power. Second, of course, is the meltdown, even possibly implosion, of the US economy on the Republican watch (specifically, on that of George W. Bush, the least popular president in memory, as measured by recent opinion polls)..... Third, there has been a noticeable trend in shifting party affiliations in which the Democrats are gaining membership as the Republicans are losing it, especially in key battleground states like Pennsylvania...." (And fifth: the youngs!) Is Is True? Not really! Because back then, the Dems rode the depression through countless elections and Roosevelt remained popular! If things suck more in 2012 than they do now, Obama will be blamed. 1992 Sez Who? Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, writing in the New York Times, says "January 2009 is starting to look a lot like January 1993." Why Now? "Then, the federal deficit was running at roughly $300 billion a year, or about 5 percent of gross domestic product, way too high for comfort. By contrast, the deficit for the 2009 fiscal year is now projected to be $410 billion, or about 3.3 percent of gross domestic product." Uh, ok. Is It True? Not really! Back then we'd had two terms of a mostly popular Republican followed by one disastrous term of an unpopular Republican who was considered out of touch. This is the "John McCain wins this year" option. 1976 Sez Who? Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, blogging for the Wall Street Journal, says, "one could see this year’s scenario as closer to 1976, when a previously unknown Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, promising a breath of fresh air in the White House, seized on the public clamor for change and won the presidency." Why Now? "The public mood in 1976, less than two years after Republican Richard Nixon resigned the presidency due to Watergate, and with the economy hurting due to what was then skyrocketing gasoline prices, was almost as sour as today." And! "Mr. Carter, a former one-term governor of Georgia offered a candidacy that conceded a lack of Washington experience, much like Sen. Obama. And, as Sen. Obama so far this year, Mr. Carter prospered because the national mood valued change over all else." Is It True? You know, it might be! 1988 Sez Who? Peter Brown, again! Why Now? Two-term Republican ends on a not-too-popular note, Dems nominate a proud liberal, economy not looking hot. Is It True? Probably not, because Obama's looking way better than Dukakis. But! Worst Case Scenario It is 1988 redux. Only Obama is Bush senior. Remember, he's an elitist who's out of touch too! He inherits a miserable economy and can't right the ship fast enough. A brief war—or killing Bin Laden—might make him briefly, hugely popular. But a couple years from now, if things haven't improved, he gets the blame, as we said. He's basically positoined perfectly for a folsky populist Souterner to swoop in and steal the nation's heart. In other words, welcome President Huckabee! Best Case Scenario It's 1952 redux! We're mired in a pointless foreign war! Another incredibly unpopular two-term president is leaving! The country needs stability and economic renewal! In this example, Obama is Ike Eisenhower, America's favorite president! He serves two wonderful mostly peaceful terms, builds up the middle class, and everyone is happy except the beatniks. So. Should we have a poll? If so we'd like to add that maybe it's 1884, on account of how nasty everyone is.

Honestly? We'd rather read a book-length history of the Hillary Clinton campaign written by Josh Green than read another word about McCain and Obama. But let's take a look at the people currently working on their own novelistic takes on the waking nightmare that has been 2008 thus far! The Observer reports on the contenders: Michael Takiff, on oral historian. He's writing a Bill Clinton biography (though maybe it's been shelved). He's a Nation-contributing lefty, who once also tried to write a book about George McGovern. You might be able to guess how his book would read. Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Balz, the consummate Washington Post political correspondent, has been following both campaigns around and probably has the sources to get some good material for a quickie book. It's up to Haynes Johnson, the former civil rights reporter who now writes big grand sweeping statement books about how it's "the age of" something or other, to give it a cohesive narrative. That narrative will probably be pretty middle-of-the-road. And Johnson is probably too old to get THE INTERNET. But maybe it'll be good? Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Halperin writes The Page for Time. Before that, he wrote The Note for ABC. He became the King of the Washington Press Corps in the '90s when he underminded Clinton and the liberals all the time and sucked Drudge's cock incessantly. He's so far outside reality now that his last book was on how the next president would have to heed the words of Karl Rove and worship at the altar of Drudge. His blog is unreadable and he was dead wrong on the Biden pick, even though he erased the entry and tried to pretend he had it too. Heilmann, though, is the very very good New York Magazine political writer. John, find a different co-author and we're right there with you!

The inclusion of a woman on a major party's presidential ticket is unprecedented... for the Republicans. The Democrats did it back in 1984, when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferrarro for his suicide mission against Reagan. Ferraro was considered risky due to her inexperience, but her selection and her brash, confident campaigning bumped Mondale way up in the polls. The VP debate that year pit George H. W. Bush, who'd been in Washington for years in various positions of authority and who was considered something of a foreign policy expert, against Ferraro, who'd only been in the House of Representatives for a couple years. The result? See for yourself in the clip above, in which Ferraro fights back against condescension from Vice President Bush. Think of it as a preview of tonight's Biden/Palin debate, except for the fact that Ferraro is smart and can speak English.

Oh the fun we have, these days, with John McCain and Barack Obama. They are the news, every day, even when the economy fails or something, because now we expect them to fix it. So they're rocketing back to DC or something to work on that bailout plan, with some guy named... Bush? Bush. You know, the guy who weirdly made torture an important tool in the American response to terror. Ha ha remember our moral authority? Just about everyone involved in the Bush Administration probably deserves to be put on trial at The Hague, actually, but that won't happen because no one cares anymore. It just suddenly became "too late" to discuss the massive and unprecedented abuse of power by the executive branch at just the moment when everyone, even Bush conservatives, agreed that things had gotten far, far out of hand. What were we talking about again? Oh, right, everyone is complicit in the torturing. You and me and Condoleezza Rice. Of course she told the Senate yesterday that it is not her fault, this torturing. Everyone is covering their asses now that the Senate Armed Services is looking into just who decided to give the CIA authorization to torture the fuck out of people, but Condi released some documents blaming John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld for everything. Except of course that she was in the same goddamn room and her proud stand against the program was to ask Ashcroft to personally review the legal documents that Bush lawyers used to justify violating the Geneva Conventions. REMEMBER HOW OUR PRESIDENT VIOLATES THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS?? LIKE, REGULARLY, BECAUSE THAT IS HIS POLICY?? WTF! Anyway. This is fun. Our CIA actually began kinda torturing people weeks before our executive branch drafted a legal memo authorizing them to kinda torture people! The FBI objected to the torturing and "ultimately withdrew from Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation." It's funny when the FBI is the voice of reason! Funny in a "why did we all agree that the last 8 years didn't happen" way. Basically we'd like a 9/11 commission thing, here, to figure out what happened when a bunch of career conservative fuckers and their cherry-picked law school moron lackeys ran the country for eight years and basically blew it up, from the inside. Can John McCain race back to Washington and work on that?

The Newark Star-Ledger is in serious danger of going out of business, as we mentioned earlier. Its publisher yesterday threatened bluntly to close the paper on January 5 unless it gets major concessions from its drivers' union. Even if the threat is a negotiating tactic, it also reflects economic reality. Everyone knows the business is rough, but wow: are we about to see the first major American city without a newspaper? This would be historic. And not in the good way. As the industry has declined during this decade, almost every newspaper has suffered economically. Layoffs have become ubiquitous. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered across the board as a matter of policy. Large metro papers, which dominate major cities but lack a national readership, have suffered the worst. Many (if not most) of them have pulled their correspondents from Washington and brought them home, to save money and cover local news, which is believed to be the wisest area of investment. The glory days are over. Salaries are down. Older, more expensive reporters and editors are urged to take buyouts. It's harder for aspiring journalists to get first jobs, or even internships. Papers have changed physically. Their pages have shrunk. Their page count has come down. Sections which once stood alone have been combined, all to save printing and newsprint costs. Two-paper towns are becoming a rarity. Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, and, of course, New York all support at least two sizable papers. But some of them shouldn't. Particularly in smaller or declining markets, it's a war of attrition to see which paper can hang on the longest. The idea that two editorial viewpoints are a necessity in most cities has been rendered anachronistic by the internet. Recent buyers of newspapers or newspaper companies have been disappointed. Brian Tierney, an ad wizard, has been unable to restore the Philadelphia papers to their former glory. Sam Zell is being sued by his own employees for the Tribune company's declining prospects. McClatchy wishes it had never bought Knight Ridder. What we haven't seen in all this, though, is a major American city with no newspaper. Everyone believes that a paper is an essential part of a city's fabric, like city hall and the jail and the local sports team. If Newark—a town with more problems than most—is left without a paper, who will tell the world what's going on there? Who will tell Newark what its own government is up to? Even bloggers should be humble enough to pray that the Star-Ledger isn't the first in a long line of papers that disappear and leave people with no forum for the local bickering, minutiae, and moments of glory that are the real American civics lesson. Print may be dead. But it shouldn't die before something better is in place.

On the whole, the journalists who've TURNED AGAINST their former boyfriend John McCain are some of our least favorite journalists in the nation, embodying as they do everything insular and adolescent about the Washington Press Corps. They loved John McCain when he could convince them that he was only bullshitting to the voters, not to them. Now, he won't speak to them! And hey, he's lying about shit, too, but whatever. Today, another media person handed McCain back his class ring and ran home, weeping. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, explain yourself!

The Museum of the Moving Image recently launched what is basically our new favorite website: "The Living Room Candidate," a repository of (embeddable!) presidential campaign ads spanning Stevenson v Eisenhower through Obama v McCain. So, so much fun for political and advertising junkies. Also it is the history of how the United States of America killed itself. This ad will make you cry. It's Michael Dukakis responding to unfair attacks from George H. W. Bush. It's also every loser Democrat since Humphrey. Click through to watch. Click to view [Via Radosh]

Analog audiophiles can mark the dark death day of the discrete tube or transistor circuit. Digital converts can praise the integration of multiple logic gates on one chip. Either way, Jack Kilby's experimental proof of combining multiple electronic elements onto one integrated circuit changed your life forever through Texas Instruments. And yes, it has all been downhill from there — at least until you reach technological singularity, in which case the trend is supposed to reverse according to optimistic futurists. [Wired] (Photo by Tambako The Jaguar)

Sarah Palin scares the Jews! From her crazy Jew-converting church to emails your grandmother is receiving right now, it's clear that America's Jews are nervous about this woman. Just ask Ed Koch! This won't help: remember Palin's address to the Republican National Convention? That bit of speechcraft so inspiring that it is already being taught in schools alongside Dr. King's Dream Speech and Billy Crystal's second Oscars monologue? It turns out one of its few memorable non-Obama-attacking lines was lifted from an old anti-Semite so extreme that he was booted from the John Birch Society. It is, honestly, a bizarre and inexplicable story. "We grow good people in our small towns," Palin said, quoting someone identified only as a writer, "with honesty and sincerity and dignity." That "writer," Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank notes, is a man named Westbrook Pegler. You have probably never heard of him, but he was a very popular and very right-wing columnist from the first half of the 20th century. How right-wing? He openly wished for the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt, for one. And for two, he was quite the anti-Semite! He hated Jews so much, the far-right anti-Semitic John Birch Society banned him from their journal. And all Pegler did was claim that American Jews were "instinctively sympathetic to Communism"! And also claim lots of other crazy stuff! So. Quoting an old anti-Semite is obviously proof of nothing—people still say nice things about Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and Richard Nixon—but the larger question here is who put those words in her nice speech, where did they find them, and what the hell were they thinking. Like... did they think no one would notice? Who even reads Pegler anymore? Answer: Pat Buchanan! Buchanan, that lovable old coot, used that same line in a 1990 book. Buchanan, of course, did not mind being associated with a crazy old anti-Semite, and the passage was quoted in a section quite complimentary to the reactionary columnist. It really does boggle the mind, doesn't it, that they could not find another passage by another writer talking about how nice small towns are, right? Of course the line is question is also about Harry Truman, who was, of course, a Vice President who eventually became president when the guy before him died in office of old age, so really there are a lot of questions we have for the people who composed that terrible speech. Palin's Source [Ben Smith/Politico]

"Prior to the reelection of General Grant in 1872, there was a superstition prevalent that no man possessed of a middle name could be elected President a second time. The notion was based upon the fact that every President so endowed, up to that time, had, for one reason or another, failed to be reelected: John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren-if his was a triple name,-William Henry Harrison, and James Knox Polk. Even since Grant, who may be said to have been exempt from all rules, the tradition has held good. Rutherford Birchard Hayes, James Abram Garfield, and Chester Allan Arthur, were not reelected; William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were; also Grover Cleveland, after the lapse of an intermediate term,-who, it may be suggested, escaped the hoodoo by dropping his first name, Stephen, which his parents incautiously gave him." [The Atlantic via Andrew Sullivan]