Hillary Front Group Media Matters Issues "Don'ts" for Blitzer

The Clinton machine has spoken. Wolf Blitzer in moderating tonight's Democrat debate must follow the Media Matters approved script

Greg Pollowitz at NRO Media has the full list. Here's just a few. The arrogance of these folks still continues to surprise. The funny thing is now that the groups strong ties to Hillary Clinton have become common knowledge, the list leads off with requirements related to her rival Barack Obama:

• Don't contradict your own reporting and suggest that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) "cash[ed] in" on a stock deal in which he lost $13,000.

• Don't say that Obama's position on Pakistan is "very much in line with what" President Bush says regarding Pakistan.

• Don't contradict your own reporting — again — and say that Obama, in following legal requirements to count purchasers of his campaign merchandise as campaign contributors, is "apparently using some creative math" and "overselling his grassroots support."

• Don't misleadingly crop quotes when challenging a candidate's consistency on a particular issue, as NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert did on the November 11 broadcast of Meet the Press, when he suggested that Obama has "not been a leader against the [Iraq] war."

• Don't tell Obama that "[i]t's difficult to say that you're against the war and at the same time not say that you're against the troops."

• Don't suggest that former Sen. John Edwards' (D-NC) work "for financial markets" might "contradict his anti-poverty message."

• Don't adopt GOP framing and ask Edwards about his "flip-flop" on Iraq "to win the vote."

Be sure and join me tonight for the live NewsBusters chat of the debate. Note: you must be registered and logged in to do so.

Watching Democrats Debate

Courtesy of the Media Bloggers Association, I will be attending tonight's Democratic presidential debate sponsored by PBS. Should be an interesting affair.

You can catch my postings over at Ace of Spades HQ.

Struggle Against Islam, Winnable Only by a Democrat?

Glenn Reynolds:

Frankly, I think the best argument for electing a Democrat as President is that as long as a Republican is in office the media powers-that-be will refuse to condemn even the worst atrocities on the part of Islamists, for fear of helping the real enemy in the White House

I'd have to agree. Democrats have been blinded by partisanship so much that they really have lost site of the very real fact that Islamic terrorism will be a world-wide force regardless of which party has the White House. It is the height of stupidity and arrogance to even suggest that Iraq or George Bush have made violent Islamists hate America. Osama bin Laden and his ilk despise the West because we're not Muslim. He feels similarly about Muslims who do not share his particular brand of Wahhabi Islam.

It's arguable whether America's political leadership ought to be stating this fact on a regular basis; it's essential that they operate with this assumption, however.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a Democrat can defeat radical Islam. At this point, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson are the only Democratic candidates who realize this.

Obama's Gender Gap

I wonder to what extent Hillary Clinton's female advantage over Barack Obama will last in the general election:

The consistent lead that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has maintained over Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and others in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination is due largely to one factor: her support from women.

In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, Clinton led Obama by a 2 to 1 margin among female voters. Her 15-point lead in the poll is entirely attributable to that margin. Clinton drew support from 51 percent of the women surveyed, compared with 24 percent who said they supported Obama and 11 percent who said they backed former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Clinton is drawing especially strong support from lower-income, lesser-educated women -- voters her campaign strategists describe as "women with needs." Obama, by contrast, is faring better among highly educated women, who his campaign says are interested in elevating the political discourse.

Campaign advisers say they expect Obama to pick up support from all categories of voters once they get to know him better, and that could change the structure of the race. But for now, women appear to be playing an outsized role in shaping it and could tip the scale toward the winner.

In 2004, women made up a majority of the Democratic primary electorate, including between 54 and 59 percent in the early-voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina.

The Battle for Obama's Space

Memo to prospective political candidates: Don't let this happen to you. Sign up for accounts on Myspace or Facebook as part of your preparations.

At the cost of losing 160,000 friends, Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign has taken over control of the MySpace page listed under his name on the popular social networking site.

For the past two and a half years, the page has been run by an Obama supporter from Los Angeles named Joe Anthony. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.

But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony they wanted him to turn it over.

In this new frontier of online campaigning, it's hard to determine the value of 160,000 MySpace friends—about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night, while Anthony had the right to take the contact information for all the friends who signed up while he was in control. That includes the right to tell them exactly how he feels about the Obama campaign.

Anthony referred The Associated Press to his MySpace blog, where he has written that he is heartbroken that the Obama campaign was "bullying" him out of the page he built. He said the candidate has lost his vote.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is trying to rebuild his friends network from scratch and was up to more than 17,000 by midday Wednesday. "We support the MySpace community, and look forward to building our relationship," said campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Why Most Sports Writers Suck

I generally avoid sports media, in part because everything is so ridiculously overhyped, and also because sports writers usually are not journalists. Were they, much of the idiotic behavior that is tolerated from players and management wouldn't be.

Sports writing and commentary is usually lame as well. Nowhere else do you here such antiquated words as "harriers." Sports writers are especially lame when they try to inject their (irrelevant) personal political views into their writing or make preposterous analogies. My MRC colleague Tim Graham caught one such bout of moronitude earlier today:

Sports Illustrated has this annoying tendency to serve up its sports coverage with a side dish of liberal politics. On its website, basketball writer Jack McCallum wrote of deciding to compare Democratic presidential candidates to NBA playoff teams after watching the Democrats debate on C-SPAN in the middle of the night after some spicy quesadillas.

He began by lauding Mike Gravel's routine of poking Barack Obama about which country America should "nuke" next. "So there you are -- Gravel is the Golden State Warriors. A feisty, combative, in-your-face underdog who loves the public stage." Later, McCallum added to the comparison: "Unorthodox and even a little scary, both are trying to overcome the odds with offense." Here are the other comparisons, enough to ruin the day of a conservative fan of any of these teams:

Chicago Bulls = Dennis Kucinich: Undersized but confident and intelligent. Neither team nor candidate will go away even if some say they have no chance of advancing any farther.

Cleveland Cavaliers = Joe Biden: The Cavs, like the candidate, seem awfully confident and even haughty. But they make critical mistakes and haven't shown they can close.

Dallas Mavericks = Hillary Clinton: The target everyone was gunning for from the beginning. No-nonsense and business-like, both candidate and team have a strong male figure behind the throne, one named Bill, one named Mark. As with Hillary, it was the Mavs' to lose ... and they just might lose it.

Phoenix Suns = John Edwards: Neat, clean, fun and articulate, with a strong chance of proving they are not third best.

Detroit Pistons = Barack Obama: Both team and candidate are poised almost to the point of smugness and both are a strong favorite to make the Final Two. But get either of them in a tight spot and they know how to mix it up, and, possibly, even self-destruct.

San Antonio Spurs = Bill Richardson: A strong resume and an understated way of getting things done. In many respects, in fact, the best in the field. But both team and candidate are often overlooked and undervalued.

Houston Rockets (or Utah Jazz or New Jersey Nets) = Christopher Dodd: All three teams have a track record, they're kind of hanging around and, like the veteran senator from Connecticut, their face is familiar. But no one is quite sure if they're really in the race.

I'm sure it's safe for McCallum to call Edwards "clean" and "articulate," but it might be more politically troublesome (a la Biden) to use those adjectives for the Suns.