A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way. ~John Tudor

Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. ~Shana Alexander

But it’s put every news organization in a peculiar quandary the last two days; namely, there may be a big story brewing involving the state’s chief executive, but nobody can say what it is, or even IF it is. There are just a lot of…rumors. Here’s how the ever-factual Associated Press is handling it as of Monday afternoon:

ALBANY, N.Y (AP) - A spokeswoman for New York Gov. David Paterson is calling rumors about his personal behavior "absolutely false" and says he will not resign.
Paterson spokeswoman Marissa Shorenstein made the statement Monday.
Rumors around the Capitol and anonymous reports in some media outlets about Paterson personal conduct come as he considers seeking election later this year.

Did you get that? Governor Paterson is not going to resign! But what is he not resigning over? “Rumors around the Capitol”? “Anonymous reports in some media outlets”? His “personal behavior/conduct”? All of which tells you absolutely nothing. I wouldn’t resign over nothing either.

How wrong is this?:

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) - The only man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has returned home to Libya to die after Scotland released him from prison Thursday, a decision that outraged some relatives of the 270 people killed when the jetliner blew up over a Scottish town. …thousands were on hand to greet him warmly when his plane from Scotland touched down at a military airport in Tripoli. There was a festive atmosphere with some wearing t-shirts with al-Megrahi's picture. Others waved Libyan and Scottish flags while Libyan songs blared.

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been searching my soul for the past few days to see if my opinion that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi needed to die in prison--hopefully with a great deal of discomfort--fell short of fulfilling my self-image as a reasonably compassionate human being. I mean, it seemed pretty clear to justice authorities in Scotland that this man who helped snuff out so many innocent lives should enjoy freedom in the final months of his own life before his terminal prostate cancer killed him. Obviously Scottish leaders were feeling compassion toward al-Megrahi. It shouldn’t be too big of a leap for us to understand their mindset. Scotland is part of Great Britain, America’s closest ally. Hell, MY family heritage is Scottish. What was I missing here?

Like other New Yorkers, I wrap up this work week filled with disgust about what’s been happening in Albany. The defection of two Democratic state senators term limits to the GOP caucus seemed to put Republicans back in charge of the upper (and I use the term very loosely) chamber after only term limits five months of control by Democrats. The result: nobody has any idea WHO is running the show. Democratic senate leader Malcolm Smith buh-bye is holding on to his leadership position, but just barely. It may be that the only way for Democrats to keep their erstwhile majority is for them to give Smith the heave-ho already gone. Give the man some credit, though; after a party’s been out of power in a legislative chamber for 40-years like Democrats were, it’s not easy to lose it again after just five months.

Meetings have been held all day between various factions involved in the Republican “takeover” of the New York State Senate. The GOP caucus claims it now has majority status after two of the least reputable democratic senators, Pedro Espada, Jr. and Hiram Monserrate, switched sides at the instigation of billionaire political fixer Tom Golisano. One of those meetings might have gone something like this...

I feel bad for David Carradine and his surviving family members and friends. He was an interesting performer, he carved out a couple of great characters during his long career, and he SHOULD have been able to advance deeper into old age as a respected and versatile actor who successfully carried on his famous family’s name.

Now he’s going to be remembered as the old Kung Fu dude who died in the closest of his Thailand Hotel room with a rope around his neck and his privates. So much for death with dignity.

When Donald Trump emerges as the voice of reason in a controversy, you know things have gotten out of hand. I refer to The Donald’s correct decision today to allow Miss California-USA, Carrie Prejean, to keep her state crown in the wake of her comments during the Miss USA pageant that she is against same sex marriage. That wasn’t all, of course.

There were the semi-nude photos of Prejean that came out after the pageant, held up as evidence of her hypocrisy about being a Christian conservative. There were her breast implants, which were paid for by the California pageant (I’ll bet Miss North Dakota was never given that option). There was the political firestorm over her opinions on same-sex marriage. There was Perez Hilton, who is thwarting my best efforts to not know anything about him.

Wow. When you can put gays, gossip, politics, Donald Trump, and boobs under one headline, you’ve got yourself the Great American News Story. But there’s only one problem: this wasn’t much a story in terms of real news.

I’ll keep this brief, Senators, because there’s not any more time to waste. I must say, even by Albany’s standards, the futzing around over an MTA bailout has reached a new low. For weeks, the Senate leadership has dithered over something that will have an immediate impact on the wallets of more than 2-million transit users. 2-Million! That’s more people than most states’ entire populations. How many other top priorities do you have preventing you from pulling this together?

I hope you’ve heard by now that without a plan, the MTA doomsday budget kicks in… only now it’s being called Doomsday-Squared. The MTA’s deficit is now projected to be around $600-million more by next year, and they’re talking about eliminating or cutting way back on late night and overnight subway service. If that happens, it won’t be just an inconvenience for the many thousands of people who ride those trains—it’ll mean they can’t get to their jobs. What do you have to say to those people?

Optibamatism: def. – The phenomenon of the persistence of a relatively high level of optimism under President Obama during his first 100-days in office.

I was sitting in our news meeting today, my eyes wandering over to the bank of TV monitors in my news director’s office, and I saw an interesting juxtaposition of items being displayed on the typically busy cable news screen. The headline at the bottom of the page read something like “Swine Flu Spreading Across the U.S.”… not a “happy” headline, to say the least. And then over on the lower right hand corner of the screen was the stock ticker, showing the Dow industrial average at that minute. It read “+150.” That, I thought, is a good example of optibamatism (see above).

I’m not going to go into President Obama’s individual policy initiatives as I join the long line of mediacs commenting on the mythical First 100-Days (a benchmark so arbitrary, John Dickerson of Slate likened it to one of those invented Hallmark holidays… you know, Grandparents Day, Secretaries Day, First 100 Days Day). I’m just addressing the national mood toward the president, and the reasons behind it, as we make our way through this bruising chapter in our history.

Today’s news about former Senator Alfonse D’Amato and his wife expecting a baby reopens yet again the discussion about older dads. I refer specifically to MUCH older dads; D’Amato is 71, and not new to this. He and his wife had a son 14-months ago. D’amato certainly sounds confident that his age won’t be a problem, since he plans on being around for a while.

“’I’ve got good genes. Papa will be 96 in May and Mama is 94. Age today is nothing. I still don’t have an AARP card.’ This pregnancy was planned for the couple. When this baby graduates from school, Alfonse will be 89 years old.”

And that’s really the big issue: is it “fair,” for lack of a better word, for senior citizen men to have babies with their younger wives, when it’s very likely they might not be around for a big portion of their child’s life, or even their child’s childhood? One classic New York example is the actor Tony Randall. He had his first child with his 26-year-old wife when he was 77. They later had a son. Randall died in 2004, with his children 6 and 7-years-old.

It’s recess time on a kindergarten playground. Today, that new obnoxious kid is really hassling everybody. He’s small, but he’s loud and irritating, and what he lacks in strength he makes up with bluster. He knows instinctively that if he can get under the skin of the bigger kid who is the classroom leader, or have the big kid run away from him, he’ll start getting more attention and power.

Much was made, at least for one news cycle, of President Obama shaking hands and being polite with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez while they were attending the Summit of the Americas last week in Trinidad. To his critics, led by former vice president Cheney and Newt Gingrich, Obama’s courtesy was somehow legitimizing Chavez’s socialistic policies and anti-American leanings and rhetoric. The right thing to do, the Right is saying, would have been for the President to consciously avoid contact with Chavez, using his staffers and security entourage if necessary to do so.

I don’t necessarily agree with new research getting lots of media attention today showing that marital bliss is significantly diminished when a couple has children.

“Researchers from the University of Denver and Texas A&M University studied 218 couples for eight years and found that even though childless couples also show diminished marital bliss over time, those with children had an accelerated decline -- particularly during adjustment to parenthood right after the birth.”

I don’t necessarily disagree, either. I would take a different approach to the argument overall, namely this: It depends what you mean by “bliss.”

Another day, more day-late-and-$165-million-dollars-short displays of rage by all of you aimed at AIG. I heard one news report tonight that you’re “trying to get out in front” of the national anger over the undeserved-- to put it mildly-- bonuses that taxpayers ended up funding for the insurance conglomerate. Well, you’re a little late. But if you’re interested in looking toward the future, let’s talk. Not AIG’s future, by the way. Your future. In elected office.

Here are some matters on which you’ll be judged by a much larger than usual number of your constituents next November. Pay attention. Things are different now. That 98-percent re-election rate for House members isn’t going to hold up this time, no matter how many new highway overpasses for your district you larded onto a spending bill. The big question is, where are your allegiances? To the regular people you represent, or to big financial and corporate interests writing checks for your campaigns?

Media weenie that I am, I feel compelled to be one more voice giving the proverbial two-cents worth on the takedown of CNBC’s Jim Cramer by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” last night. You can’t swing a dead cat today without hitting a link to the interview, but here’s one more.

PART 1: Stewart vs. Cramer:

At this point, I’m as tired of it all as I’m sure Stewart and Cramer are, so I’ll be brief. Although there’s no doubt that the comedian bested the money man—took him apart piece by piece, actually—I still think it’s worth looking at from two basic perspectives, and I’ll provide two links that might give you an idea what those perspectives are.

I’ll tell you right off that I claim to have no answer to the question that’s the title of this post. That’s a little above my spiritual grade, you might say. And I guess there really is no knowable, provable answer to the question anyway. I recently watched a documentary series called “Most Evil,” in which a Columbia University professor used a scale he’d devised to actually measure the relative “evil” of a host of serial killers. I know of no such scale for thieves. But in the case of Bernard Madoff, perhaps history’s worst individual thief/swindler at least in terms of dollar amounts, it’s an interesting topic.

First of all, congratulations on becoming the leader of the Republican Party, at least according to Democrats. That must be pretty heady stuff, especially for someone who has never actually held any kind of political office. But with 15-million ultra-faithful listeners ready to follow you into battle, you’ve got as much right as anybody on the right to be the boss. Well, not OFFICIALLY the boss, but you know what I mean

But as the de facto party poobah, I’m not sure you handled it right when you said a couple of weeks ago that you hope President Obama fails. Oh, you have every right to disagree vehemently with his policies and proposals, especially on his plans for dealing with the economic crisis. But, geez… you hope he FAILS? You put your fellow Republicans, the ones who actually do hold office, in a tough place with that one.

The reviews are in on President Obama’s speech before Congress Tuesday night. Lots and lots and lots of reviews; good ones, from the people you’d expect would be giving Obama good reviews, and some bad ones from people you’d expect….. well, you know what I’m saying. But I’ll tell you one group of people I’m guessing was VERY impressed with the address, and feel that having President Obama in office is going to make their jobs much easier: speech teachers.

A lot of people checked out my blog post from last night about the New York Post and the now-infamous chimp cartoon. Scores of you also wrote comments, some agreeing with my assessment that the cartoon is clearly racist in nature and intent, and others saying it’s just as clearly NOT racist. Curiously, not one person commented on the central premise of my post: that we could well be seeing more instances of overt (as opposed to coded) racism as the reality of having our first president of African descent sinks in among people angrily opposed to Barack Obama, both the person and his policies.

Tonight, I’m going to go all academic on you. Here’s a different viewpoint from someone who has studied the exact topic the Post controversy has, shall we say, illuminated: the sensitivities to the centuries-old racist caricature of black people as apes or monkeys. I came across an article written by a social psychologist named Phillip Atiba Goff, an associate professor at UCLA. Dr. Goff’s research, according to his on-line academic profile, “.. focuses on the intersection of identity and social justice” and how it relates to policing and the criminal justice system.

First of all, let’s get past the question of whether the chimpanzee cartoon in the New York Post is racist or not.

It is. It is classically racist; acutely, explicitly, unmistakably racist. It’s Racism 101. Newsday talked to some people who study these things:

"Sybil Mimy Johnson, who teaches African studies courses at Hofstra University, said the cartoon recalls a history of unflattering comparisons of African-Americans to primates.

'If you go back to Jim Crow and you go back to the whole depiction of cartoons then, it was demeaning for African-Americans, calling them animals,' she said. 'This is extremely insensitive and it reaches back to those old wounds.'

'How could The Post let this cartoon pass as satire?' said Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists. "To compare the nation's first African-American commander-in-chief to a dead chimpanzee is nothing short of racist drivel.'"

Oh, Christian Bale. Who speaks for you?

The actor’s on-set tantrum got quite a bit of attention this week on local and entertainment news programs, and was severely mocked on most or all of the late night talk shows. It became part of a new mash-up with a years-ago snit by then-“Inside Edition” anchor Bill O’Reilly. Video after the jump.

There’s much to be gleaned about what’s changed and what hasn’t changed in Washington after not a single Republican house member voted in favor of President Obama’s economic stimulus package tonight. On the surface, of course, it means a certain kind of partisanship—a good kind, in my view—is alive and well.

While much was made of Obama’s so-called charm offensive to win GOP support for the enormous stimulus bill, I doubt that he really thought he would change any republican minds. It was a gesture in keeping with his promise to reach across the aisle when he makes policy. He reached, the loyal opposition disagreed, the vote was taken and the majority party won. That’s the way the system works. Good for the winning majority, and good for the Republicans who unanimously stood behind clearly-stated reasons they didn’t like the bill.

Political junkies, especially those who follow New York politics, must be in their bliss as we end this week. Time to tally up how all the players did, starting with an easy one...

George Bush might be out of office and clearing brush all the live-long day down in Crawford, but apparently, it’s still not polite party conversation to raise even the possibility of questioning certain aspects of his administration. In my blog post yesterday, I merely called for a responsible investigation of issues like torture, domestic spying, and extraordinary rendition that the Bush White House permitted as part of its fight against terrorism.

Well, my goodness, you would have thought I’d said there weren’t any WMD’s in Iraq. Here are a few of the comments from readers, both negative and positive… with my comments on the comments (Hey, it is MY blog!)

It’s always ironic to hear “law and order” conservatives discourage efforts to maintain… law and order. Example #1, currently one of the biggest elephants in the (Oval) room keeping our new president company, is the matter of whether former Bush administration officials—up to and including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—should be investigated for crimes against the Constitution committed in the name of fighting terror.

Here’s Fox News stalwart Mort Kondracke last month:

“For the sake of national security and national unity, President-elect Barack Obama should put a stop to efforts to investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials for anti-terror "war crimes."

".. The motive behind such efforts is not -- as claimed -- "truth" or "justice," but political vengeance.”

There are a handful of things I’ve always felt comfortable predicting I will never, ever do in my life, and will never want to do. Running in the New York City Marathon is one of them. Climbing Mount Everest is another. (Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about people who try to climb Mount Everest? One word: Ceaseless misery. Okay, that’s two words.)

First of all today, thanks to my lovely and talented co-anchor and office wife Kaity, who did a bang-up job guest blogging last Friday. I thought it was very funny the way she acted as if she isn’t 100-percent supportive of my new blogging habit, calling me, among other things, a “fool” who appears “unhinged” by it. She is a character, isn’t she? I don’t know how her husband Maury puts up with all that kidding around.

Kaity Tong PIX News At Ten Guest Blogger

WHAT is this obsession with blogging? I am telling you, I DON’T GET IT!

So why, perhaps you are asking yourself, are you now writing one? Because of THE PRESSURE!

I am not kidding. First, there’s my co-anchor, Jim, who is a blogging fool. And he has managed to make me feel inadequate, simply by blogging CONSTANTLY. Our offices are right next door to each other, so even when his door is closed, I can see him through a window that runs the length of the door from ceiling to floor. And I can tell you, it is troubling. If not downright disturbing, to see my colleague staring at the computer screen, with a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, eyes glazed, a rictus of concentration around his lips.This is one handsome guy we are talking about here, but when he’s blogging, not so much.

Sometimes, I even catch him chuckling to himself, as if he’s penned an especially witty line, and is really happy with himself. Or, frowning at his computer screen, his mouth set, his fingers flying over the keyboard. MUST BE A DIATRIBE OF SOME KIND!!

It concerns me because frankly, at times he appears slightly unhinged. And I say to myself, THAT WILL NEVER BE ME!

It certainly seems like the scandal involving Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is setting a new standard for brazen, in-your-face political corruption, at least at the gubernatorial level. So brazen, in fact, the speculation in the Illinois media and on the blogosphere today is that the man is clinically insane. People will tend to think that about a person, who, knowing he’s under federal investigation, shouts, “I want money!” into a telephone he must have suspected was tapped. One psychiatrist interviewed by a Chicago TV station said Blagojevich exhibits sociopathic traits, but that he might not be a full-blown sociopath, which is actually the nicest thing anybody has said about him since this thing broke.

How strange life can be. One day, you’re a low-profile lieutenant governor of New York, little known beyond Albany. Then the next day, the governor himself gets caught up in a prostitution scandal, you become chief executive, your state’s superstar junior U.S Senator is chosen to become the next Secretary of State and YOU get to name her replacement with the whole world watching. Whew!

Well, all that didn’t actually happen on one day, but I sort of telescoped things for dramatic purposes. Not that Governor David Paterson needs any more drama on this succession question. If you’ve been following the news, you know it’s up to him and him alone to name Hillary Clinton’s replacement after she moves to the State Department next month. Naming a U.S. Senator: that’s quite a responsibility, considering it’s a call made with no oversight by either voters or other elected officials. But what oversight there is, in a manner of speaking, comes from the complex web of political considerations that will go into Paterson’s choice. Who does he want to please with his selection? Who does he NEED to please? What are the considerations for his own political future? What pressures is he feeling from the national democratic party and the U.S. Senate leadership?

Something changed for me today in the way I view the financial crisis. I’m sure I’m not alone; the stock market losing nearly a thousand points in 36 hours can have the effect of, as Samuel Johnson would put it, focusing the mind wonderfully. Johnson was referring to the prospect of being hanged. After today, I’m not sure I’m seeing all that much difference between the two situations.

Of course, we’ve been reporting on this collapse for over two months now, so maybe I’m a little late to the pity party. But I suspect this week, with the plummeting dow and the existential threat to the nation’s auto industry and the predictions of doom for retailers, has brought a lot of people to the realization that we are in very, very serious trouble, and heading into deeper trouble..

If Senate Majority leader Harry Reid was really serious today when he said “nobody was more angry than me” about Joe Lieberman campaigning against Barack Obama during the presidential race, he needs to go check out the liberal blogs tonight, like here and here. After Reid’s democratic caucus voted overwhelmingly to let Lieberman return to their fold with only mild punishment, he’ll be able to find lots and lots of people who seem muuuuuuuuuuuch more angry than he ever was with the Connecticut Senator.

Rereading my blog post of last week about Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman’s future in the Democratic party, I’m now struck by how my assumptions in the piece were based on a Washington political paradigm that may no longer exist. Lieberman’s fate in the wake of his fervent support for defeated presidential candidate John McCain, as well as his negative attacks on Barack Obama, his own party’s candidate, has been much in discussion this week. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking—assuming, I should say again—that Lieberman would be treated as a traitor by his fellow democrats; that he would be stripped of his committee chairmanships, sent to the furthest reaches of the back bench (if he was allowed to caucus with Democrats at all), denied support for any of his legislative efforts, made to wear a big red clown nose, and perhaps even be given a wedgie.

Barack Obama, as US President-elect, speaking during first post-election press conference after meeting with his economic advisory team, behind him are (l-r): Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and newly appointed Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Chicago, Illinois. (AP/November 7, 2008)

He made it through 19-months of a grueling campaign without ever really seeming tired. But after three days of being President-elect… and three days of finding out more about the scope and depth of the financial crisis.. I thought Barack Obama looked a little weary today at his first news conference since the election. Who could blame him? What a whiplash that has to be: the ecstasy of winning a historic presidential race, followed immediately by a fuller understanding of just how hard the job is going to be. One politico joked to me on Tuesday that the winner of the race was going to demand a recount.

There will be countless essays, columns, and blog posts in the days and weeks ahead, analyzing and deconstructing Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential race this week. We want to grasp the magnitude of it all, the surreal enormity of this change to the American political and societal landscape. Capturing it in words? Well, it’s a big job.

So let me focus here on just one cultural element of what it means to America and the world to have Barack Obama as our next president:

Cool is back.

Dear Mike,

May I call you Mike? It’s so much less formal. First of all, congrats on the term limits thing. Actually, that’s sort of what I wanted to write you about. I have some thoughts about your political future, and it doesn’t include you running for mayor again.

It was just last year, but already it seems sort of quaint that the role of bloggers in the body politic was being belittled by the mainstream media. In this presidential election, political blogs... at least the big ones attracting the most internet traffic... have played a huge part in how this presidential campaign has unfolded.

Damn! I KNEW I should have gotten that Ph.D. in economics. It would sure come in handy these days. While it’s certainly possible to read nonstop about the causes of the current financial crisis and the wisdom or lack thereof for the administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout, I think I speak for many of us when I ask, what the hell is going on? By the way, that’s actually a quote in today’s New York Times from Bruce Bartlett, a former economist in the Reagan administration.

Here’s what he said: “The problem is people are operating in a world in which nobody knows what the hell is going on.” And this guy DOES have a Ph.D. in economics.

That’s probably my favorite new phrase to come out this long and torturous presidential race. And it’s the reason why I’m not going to blog about the race anymore.

The phrase comes from one of the top advisors to one of the candidates. It means, essentially, phony impartiality by the media covering the race; that while it’s expected that political journalists doing so-called “straight” news, not commentary, be evenhanded to both sides, evenhandedness itself becomes a lie when it prevents greater truths from being told. When the topic is blatant lies being told by one campaign, the symmetry of sin calls for reporters to say, essentially, that the other side does it, too. Even if doesn’t, or doesn’t do it nearly as much. It’s “objectivity” that is extremely misleading.

I just watched the beginning of the newscast (the “top” of the show, if you speak newsroom-ese) for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the open to the show when the big stories in the broadcast are ”teased” for a few seconds before the anchor shows up on camera. For the first time in many weeks, the presidential campaign didn’t make the cut on this newscast preview. Instead, the Wall Street financial crisis, the devastation left behind by Hurricane Ike in Texas, and the aftermath of the horrible commuter train crash in Los Angeles got the nod.

I was going to write tonight about the words and phrases used with numbing repetitiveness over the course of the national political conventions the past two weeks. Let’s run down just a few:

• “Vetting” It’s something that was either done insufficiently with Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign, or something that was overdone by the mean old media. Either way, time to give it a rest.

• “Maverick” The old John McCain label made a big comeback this week. It means being independent in thought and action. The problem is, I don’t think real mavericks go around talking about what mavericks they are. If everybody in the group acclaims you as a maverick, then, by definition, you aren’t one. Interestingly, the other definition of maverick is an unbranded stray calf, that’s considered the property of the first person who brands it. That could be an interesting political metaphor.

• “Hockey Mom” Are moms from every single sport eventually going to be broken into distinct demographic voting blocks? Do you campaign differently with hockey moms than with soccer moms? Are there enough hockey moms to throw the election one way or the other?

• “Elite” It was generally used by Republicans this week as an insult, directed at either the media or Barack Obama. And yet “elite” is defined as “the best or most skilled members of a group.” This is strange. It’s like saying, “don’t vote for him, he’s the best.” Read more after the jump.

Gov. Sarah Palin's speech Wednesday night fired up Republican delegates at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Getty Images)

If there were any hopes left that the 2008 presidential election would be the dawning of a post-partisan age in Washington, a time when political issues would trump political insults, they were shattered last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. Insults were the order of the evening, especially from Sarah Palin. The plucked-from-obscurity vice presidential nominee delivered more of a Don Rickles routine than a speech, and I think it’s going to backfire for the Republicans.

Here was a real opportunity to introduce not only a new face on the American political scene, but a new perspective, a new paradigm, even. Who better to guide us away from the hateful politics that have divided our nation these past 15-years, than someone like Governor Palin? A mom, a parent of a special needs child, a charismatic woman and speaker, who’s proved in her limited time in public life to be a mover and shaker, someone from a part of the country almost no one knows. It could all have been so NEW and fresh and hopeful, and I’m guessing many of the 37-million people who watched the speech, almost as many as watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver last week, wanted to hear a message with exactly those qualities.

A Georgian woman holding her baby cries over her damaged home in Gori, Georgia, just outside the breakaway province of South Ossetia Aug. 10, 2008. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

Who in the world could have ever imagined that during the Beijing Olympics, China would become the SECOND-most watched and controversial nation on the globe? Russia’s invasion of Georgia has turned from a border incursion a few days ago into what appears to be an all-out war, and a very savage one, at that. There have been many civilian deaths. Russian troops and tanks are splitting the former Soviet Republic in two, and Monday a Georgian embassy official in Moscow said it appears Russia’s goal is nothing less than the “complete liquidation” of the Georgian government.

If you’ve been keeping up with the conflict, you know there’s a small portion of Georgia known as South Ossetia, where separatists have operated as an independent nation, ethnically and politically closer to Russia than the West-leaning government of Georgia. Both sides claim the other started this week’s hostilities. Whichever is true, initial skirmishes between Georgian forces and separatists brought Russia into the conflict, and the tanks began rolling. (For a superb summation of the causes of the conflict, as well as how natives of Georgia here in New York are reacting, check out this story from Friday night by CW11 reporter Chris Glorioso after the jump.)

Britney Spears and Paris Hilton?

Oh, my. This got out of hand MUCH sooner than I expected.

John McCain's new anti-Obama ad, unveiled Wednesday, aims to link the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to two pop tarts whose names have become synonomous with shallowness, outsized celebrity status, undersized talent, poor driving habits, and dubious parenting skills. Among other things.

When I heard about the ad, I couldn't see how it could be effective for McCain. If you're going to link someone to someone else in the minds of people seeing the ad, there should be some valid points of comparison. Looking at the list above, I just don't see where there's that much common ground between Mr. Obama and Ms.'s Hilton and Spears. Even his detractors would be hard-pressed to say Obama isn't a bright guy, so that rules shallowness out. He's obviously talented in his chosen field of politics, or we wouldn't be having this little talk, would we? I don't think there have been any negative things said about his role as father to his two little girls. I'm not sure if he's a good driver or not.

Obviously the one thing they DO have in common is that they're all famous. But this is a curious tactic for McCain. As our CW11 reporter Chris Glorioso said on the news last night, it puts McCain in the odd position of criticizing his opponent for being popular and well-known. And not well-known because he made a sex tape or didn't wear underpants. He's well-known because he's a U.S. Senator, a powerful speaker, and he's running for president. Read more after the jump.

If you type the phrase “political junkies” in Google, you get nearly 600-thousand websites. But when you put, instead: “Define: political junkies,” you get, precisely, none. Zero. And, yes, I made sure all the words were spelled correctly. (Did you know Google was also a dictionary? Actually, it’s almost every dictionary. Type in Define:, then the word or phrase you’re searching for, and you’ll get definitions from just about every published dictionary in several languages. I know it’s probably not cool to still be impressed by Google, but I’m just sayin’..)

Of course, we all know what a political junkie is, even without a formal definition. It’s someone who eats, drinks, sleeps, reads, blogs, reads blogs, and most of all, WATCHES, political news. And in a presidential election year, life is one, big long overdose for a political junkie.

All well and good. Junkies of all stripes should get their fixes. (I don’t speak here, of course, of a true junkie; Google definition: a narcotics addict). I mean people into sports, Star Wars, crossword puzzles, whatever. But with political junkies, especially when it comes to cable television news, the power they wield is is becoming disproportionate.