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This is some shameful shit.

Why do John Harris and Jim Vandehei keep doing this?

Media madness. Reporters complain about the lack of spontaneity in politics. Then we punish spontaneity by ensuring that any impolitic comment gets played and replayed, often simplified and distorted in each replaying—usually accompanied with disapproving analysis about a candidate’s lack of discipline and inability to stay on message.The lack of press access to both candidates this fall is frustrating. But the truth is McCain would be foolish to indulge in the kind of free-flowing, free-associating conversations that won such notice in 2000. Obama’s natural instincts are to tightly control his image and words, which works nicely in this media environment.

An unscripted campaign would be more interesting and more useful to voters, but it would require two unlikely ingredients: Candidates self-confident enough to throw out the script, and a news media that would devote as much attention to ideas as to gaffes.

Every couple of months, they come out with a new op-ed that lambastes the media’s role in cheapening our democracy and creating a substanceless, horserace-obsessed politics. Then, in the interim, they run a major political publication whose latest innovation is crowning a daily winner of the day’s news cycle. Either they should become that “news media that would devote as much attention to ideas as to gaffes” or they should admit that it’s impossible and quit their jobs in a very public protest.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has not held a press conference in nearly four weeks of campaigning, on Tuesday banned reporters from her first meetings with world leaders, allowing access only to photographers and a television crew.

CNN, which was providing the television coverage for news organizations, decided to pull its TV crew, effectively denying Palin the high visibility she had sought. …

The campaign told the TV producer, print and wire reporters in the press pool that follows the Alaska governor that they would not be admitted with the photographers and camera crew taken in to photograph the meetings. At least two news organizations, including The Associated Press, objected and were told that the decision was not subject to discussion.

Via: the mothership.

In the two weeks since Maddow took over the 9pmET slot, the program’s nine shows have averaged 556,000 demo viewers and 1.6M Total Viewers. Maddow’s averages are more than double the final two weeks (eight shows) of Verdict with Dan Abrams (225,000 demo / 601,000 Total Viewers.)

Talkingpointsmemo.com: 12 staff members, 2.5 milliion unique readers per month.

Just sayin’.

Update: Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei says their internal numbers are much higher than 3 million.  My point still stands (unless it’s 6X the 3 mill), but I thought it was fair to point that out.

But he’s wrong that the only options right now are aggregators who link and newspapers who get links.  His readers may be fighting that fight, but aggregators and newspapers are already there and moving.

On the newspaper side, we’re already seeing movement.  We don’t have to “imagine if the NYTimes.com put above the fold on its homepage a continuously updated list of links ot breaking news around the web.”  Or at least we won’t have to wait much longer.  As reported in July, the Times is getting ready to launch Times Extra “which will be links to stories from NYT competitors, and will even occupy space on NYTimes.com homepage, a huge leap for the paper’s rather cloistered journalistic attitude of lore.”  It’s only a toe in the water, but as PaidContent notes it’s a dramatic move if it continues.  And as with many things, if The New York Times is going there, others are sure to follow.

On the aggregator side, Karp couldn’t be more wrong that “Drudge has NO COMPETITION!”  Huffington Post is first a foremost an aggregator and is investing huge amounts of money in hiring up a reporting staff to reach the hybrid model he’s describing.   At TPM, we launched an aggregating front page over a year ago that sends hundreds of thousands of pageviews a day to sites other than TPM.  And we had a reporting staff before we launched the aggregator that’s only grown since.

The story to watch is not if, but how these hybrid models develop.

It’s time to start asking new questions: As aggregators report more news and newspapers do more aggregation, how does the market settle out?  How do big news sites negotiate mass audiences and the need to compete witih niche aggregators?  Will regional papers allow Huffington to get a foot in the door and start to develop an audiene or beat them there and prevent a challenge?

Karp is right that newspapers still need to be pushed. But my sense from things like Times Extra and the folks I talk to is that people are starting to catch on, and the real battle is about to be waged.

Via Micah on Twitter.

This is our schedule, 8 PM-Midnight Eastern:

8 PM     Me
9 PM     Rach
10 PM   Me
11 PM   Rach

It’s not just that I’m her lead-in; she is also my lead-in.

When I do really well at 8, she’s likely to do really well at 9. If she does really well at 9, I’m likely to do really well at 10. If I do really well at 10, she’s likely to do really well at 11.

So if she does better at 9 than I did at 8, I will do even better than I otherwise would have at 10, etc.

I did better than she did on Monday. She did better than I did on Tuesday. I did better than she did on Wednesday. But the point is, we’re talking viewership totals above 1,500,000 in each of these hours, and “demo” viewerships in giddying numbers: 500,000; 600,000; 700,000. The shows are really profitable at something like 185,000 “demo” viewers (25 to 54′s).

As you can see, fully half of the “most viewed” videos today are Fey as Palin.

None of the videos, however, are the actual original clip.  To get around copywright problems  youtubers are posting other shows showing the Palin clip.  Half of them are just duplicates of a single Fox news segment, replicated here as an ad for a free hosting service.  One of the 10, naturally, is a Rick Roll.

I’ve never seen a single video so thoroughly dominate YouTube.  Is Sarah Palin the new Queen of the Internets?

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry.  “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

Al Gore, call your office.

Not for nothing, the company that created the Blackberry is Canadian.  Just sayin’.

As someone who knows very little about development, I’m finding his writing absolutely riveting.  And, frankly, the pictures are even better.

Jack explains what SKS is helping this woman to do:

After speaking with her, my concerns (perhaps you could call them paternalistic concerns) about our members being able to price the full cost of our loans declined. She shared this thinking with me, though I have added a few additional calculations and clarifications. Her figures were not this precise, but her train of thought and explanations were.

She had decided to purchase a water buffalo, which cost ~30,000 rupees. She had Rs 10,000 in savings that she was willing to put towards the purchase of the buffalo. She would match this with a loan from us to complete the purchase. To determine if our 20,000 rupee (425 USD) loan, paid over a one-year term, was worth it, she calculated the following:

1) The cow would produce 4-6 liters of milk per day, which she could sell at Rs 15 – 18. Let’s call this Rs 75 more in daily income or Rs 500 per week, for simplicity’s sake.

2) In six months time, the cow would become pregnant. During this period, she would only be able to get 2-3 liters of milk per day. Or Rs 40 per day over the gestation and calf rearing period.

3) If the pregnancy was successful, she would be able to raise the calf for a year and then sell the calf for up to Rs 20,000.

4) She hoped to repeat the successful pregnancy at least twice more over the next four to six years.

The interest on her loan came out to Rs 5,000 on a principal of Rs 20,000. So, on a weekly basis, she was expected to pay back Rs 500 (Rs 60 in principal and Rs 15 in interest per day) per week. Consequently, for six months, if everything went okay, she would just be making her interest payments with the additional income from the milk sales. But, from then until the end of the loan repayment period, she would need to find money from somewhere to service the loan. She and her husband had decided that he would take on extra work to cover this shortfall.

She explained that she was confident that they would be able to pay the loan back over the course of the year and that, after this time, the cow would earn for the family more than the cost (interest) of the loan every four months or so.

You should read his blog, it’s fantastic.