Credit where credit is due. There's a reason why Sean Hannity makes the big bucks.

Thus, the BRAD BLOG is proud to announce and award today our inaugural "Sean Hannity Excellence in Spin" Award!

This distinguished award recognizes not only Excellence in Spin, but all of the qualities that such an ignominious distinction also embodies! Including but not limited to:

· Party Loyalty Before Country.
· Adherence to Talking Points under Extreme Duress.
· Complete Disregard for Truth in Political Discourse.
· Discarding of all Personal Credibility, Morals, Ethics and Standards in favor of The Cause.
· And last but not least, Disingenuousness Above and Beyond the Call of Duty!

...all compressed into the most economical, direct and straight-forward presentation for public consumption.

The namesake and inaugural winner of this distinguished honor, of course, goes to Fox News Channel and ABC Radio Network's Sean Hannity for the following hardball question/statement as "asked" --- in a single breath --- of a Bush Campaign Consultant on last night's Hannity & Colmes: (emphasis added to give recognition to purposeful distortions, talking point bullseyes and out and out lies in a single/statement question!)

Wow! Smartly done, Mr. Hannity! This award is named after you for a reason! Congratulations!

How does he do it? It's easy! With no true core beliefs, a complete absence of personal ethics and no moral core, you too could be our next "Sean Hannity Excellence in Spin" Award Winner! Get to work, Bill O'Reilly! You're losing ground!

(By the way, still looking for a nickname for this Award and open to suggestions! "The Shawnee"? "The Spinny"? "The Dizzy"? "The Frisby"? "The Kooly"? "The Smarmy"? "The Slimy"? Send us your suggestions!)

Don't be afraid.
Just click it.
Then be afraid.

I don't even know what to write about this one.

Read it yourself, and perhaps you can answer the question that AMERICABlog aptly asked about it..."Who are we anymore?"

I have no idea how to answer that question at this point. This isn't my America.

But as an American greater than I (Howard Dean) used to say..."You have the power! You have the power! You have the power!..."

Take it back November 2nd. Your conscience --- and grandchildren --- will thank you.

That was then (last Friday's Debate).

This is now (today's LA Times)...

It's the credibility, Stupid.

Catching up on a few items I've had sitting around...From Debate #2, Dubyanocchio said:

I realize I may be naive, but surely there's must be some "rationale" for his "1 percent" number. Perhaps there's some Freepers around who can explain to me how he managed to use that number, in public, and on national television, without it being an out and out lie.

Kevin Drum did some digging, and has more details, but basically, these seem to be the numbers for increases in discretionary spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office, over the last six administrations:

Quite a different story than the tale spun for America last Friday night. And one that should make any real conservative (not the fake Bush conservatives, apparently) shudder.

I've been too busy of late with a few non-blog realted deadlines to give the proper coverage to the story of the 62 ABC Affilliates being ordered by their owner, the rightwing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to run an anti-Kerry propoganda documentary in the days before the election on all of their local ABC afflilliate stations.

Sinclair is the same group that ordered their affilliates not to run the Nightline broadcast in which Ted Koppel read the names of those killed in Iraq. At the time, Sinclair did so because they charged, without even seeing the broadcast in question, that the show was "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq," and charged that "ABC is disguising political statements as news content."

Apparently that concern only applies to the political statements that Sinclair Broadcast Group themselves don't wish to force their afflilliates to make.

As I say, I've not been able to adequately cover this story. It's a very important one for you to follow however and help educate folks about. So I'm gonna point you towards both Josh Marshall who has some good coverage today (read the linked article, and the one below it) as well as Left Coaster who has more detail and what you can do to help put a stop to this egregious abuse of the public airwaves for political gamesmanship by the Republican Media Elite who control it!

If there's one thing I believe we've all learned over these last few months (and four years); Democracy is not free. Vigilance and hard work is sometimes required to maintain the very democracy that our Government claims (often quite cynically) to be trying to defend. You (yes, you reading this) must do something on occassion to keep these cretins and cynics honest and to keep your democracy flowing.

UPDATE: The Boycott of Sinclair is on! Here is a list of Sinclair's advertisers and contacts for them! Let them hear from you! BE CLEAR AND DIRECT, BUT BE POLITE WHEN MAKING CONTACT!

UPDATE: More from Marshall pointing out how the "documentary" in question is actually an hour-long anti-Kerry spot actually made by the SwiftBoats Vets for Bush!

I've warned you many times about taking polls with a grain of salt by noting that only the Zogby poll has come close to being right over the last two elections (their final poll in 1996 was within within one-tenth of one percent of the final results that year).

So though I pay attention to trends in the polls, I would warn you to not give them to much credence. That said, Zogby's latest daily tracking poll has Kerry widening his lead over Bush to 3 points with the numbers currently at 47%-44% averaged over the last three days.

And all of that said, I'll tell you my personal opinion that, barring a number of potentional external events, and there are quite a few possible, I am now predicting a Kerry landslide. That's right, a landslide. All Battleground States will go to Kerry (including Florida) and a number of "solid red states" to boot.

I don't often make predictions, as it's a perilous game that usually comes back to bite the predictor. Not to mention that predictions are like assholes because everybody's got one. I understand that could well be the case here. But what fun is life if you don't go out on a limb occassionally?

The main reason for my prediction is that the polls, even Zogby's, I believe, will proven to be entirely off again this year as they currently fail to account for the huge number of newly registered voters (mostly Democrat and ticked off about a myriad of things) and the enormous number of underground and unpolled folks who either don't own, or don't answer polls via land-line telephones (by law, cell phone users cannot be polled).

As I mentioned above, however, there are still a healthy number of mitigating factors (those "external events" I alluded to), that could still well come into play in the 25 days between now and Election Day and which could serve to effect my current prediction. They would include the effects and/or possibilities of (in no particular order of probability):

If none of the above materialize to any great extent, this is Kerry's race at this point. The "Liberal" media has not yet figured it out, so you haven't yet heard much of the above from the talking heads. No clue if they'll figure it out or not prior to the Election.

Sorry to you folks who believe in "jinxing" things, but I'm calling 'em here as I see 'em. Feel free to go on record in comments to tell me how I'm wrong or what I'm missing here.

UPDATE: Latest Gallup Tracking Poll now shows Kerry over Bush by 2 points (50% to 48%)! Notable mostly because this same poll had Bush up by 13 points just over three weeks ago!

UPDATE: And, oh yeah, forgot to mention. The Dems take back the Senate in the bargain as well.

Over on the Rightwing Hate site Free Republic, the top destination on the Internets for Bush Supporters, the webmaster has had to delete several posts apparently about Christopher Reeve. These are a few selections (courtesy of Digby, who has more) that were not deleted by the "America Loving Freepers":

Classy.

I've been having an Email exchange of late with one of our more Right-leaning readers who, after suggesting that he felt the Fox News Channel was not necessarily all that biased he admitted that he wasn't all that familiar with Roger Ailes, the Fox News General Manager and former media manager for Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Rush Limbaugh.

Here's a new video from MoveOn.org that gives some information on Mr. Ailes. You may conclude that MoveOn.org might only give "one side" of the issue, but the fact is there is no other side of the issue. Everything in this video is fact.

If you Rightwingers think that someone who has helped manage the political careers of folks like Reagan, Nixon, Bush Sr. and Limbaugh for at least three decades could now possibly be either fair or balanced now that he runs a news outlet, I'd ask you if you would feel the same way if James Carville or Paul Begala opened up a "news" network and claimed that they just wanted to be "fair and balanced".

Inform yourself. Watch the video.

Since my pal Fin of What We Know did such a great job with his Toon selection yesterday, I will save myself some work, and just point you over to them.

Speaking of Fin, if you haven't check out his previous video ad, "Lone Wolf", I'd recommend it. Beyond that, he has another one coming shortly (that I've gotten a preview of) and it kicks ass. Coming soon! We'll let ya know!

Andrew Sullivan (who himself has already won the above mentioned and rarely given award) posts this "Email-of-the-Day" from one of his readers:

Kudos Unnamed Andrew Sullivan reader! You are the latest BRAD BLOG "Intellectually Honest Conservative" Award Winner! Don't spend all that credibility in one place!

No, not the Presidential Debate, but very heated Real Time with Bill Maher that followed it on HBO. If you are able to check in on one of HBO's reruns today or over the next few, do yourself the favor.

For now, all I'll say is that it was quite a knock-down drag-out brawl largely from top to bottom. It was instructive, to say the least, watching panelist Tony Snow of Fox News firmly outside of the protective environs of "Fair and Balanced". Beyond that, if I can transcribe Maher's closing "New Rule" later on today I will try to do so here. It was both brutal and right on the money.

For the record, it's America's loss (and Disney/ABC's eternal shame) that Maher is not on network TV five nights a week anymore.

One quickie from last night; One of Maher's monologue jokes (paraphrasing here) "Bush was asked by one of the questioners in the debate tonight to name three mistakes he's made since being in office. Bush replied, agreeing to last week's debate, tonight's debate and next week's debate."

Yup.

No doubt you've heard or read the story by now. Drudge ran it, and so Fox (and all of the Rightwing sycophants that suck off their teets) dutifully repeated Drudge's twisted and wholly misleading interpretation.

Just prior to last night's debate, Drudge ran this screamer headline which is still at the top of his site: "ABCNEWS POLITICAL DIRECTOR MEMO SPARKS CONTROVERSY: BOTH SIDES NOT 'EQUALLY ACCOUNTABLE' ..."

The desperate and gullible on the Right all dutifully repeated it out in the blogosphere and on Fox News. But of course, if anybody actually reads the memo in question (linked above), they'd see not just the absurd claim Drudge is making, but also the validity of the memo they are choosing to disparage as some form of "proof" that ABC News is biased.

The passage in the memo that Drudge characterizes as "BOTH SIDES NOT 'EQUALLY ACCOUNTABLE'":

...So in other words, the words "we have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable" means "BOTH SIDES NOT 'EQUALLY ACCOUNTABLE'" in Wingnut World 2004.

Drudge's purposeful mischaracterization aside, what ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin seems to be writing about, if this memo is real, is something I've been pondering and hoped to touch on for some time here.

The fact is, the Right has got the supposedly "Liberal" Media so frightened and in their pocket, that they've lost all understanding of what "fair and balance" actually means!

An example; Let's say one candidate in a debate (Bush or Cheney for example) gives incorrect information 15 times in one of the debates. And in that same debate, the other candidate (Kerry or Edwards for example) give incorrect information 2 times.

What does the lamestream media report in their post-debate "Fact Check" segments? "Both candidates distorted some facts in last night's debate". And then they go about showing two examples of Bush/Cheney doing it and two examples of Kerry/Edwards doing it. Never mind that Bush/Cheney was wrong some 15 times versus Kerry/Edwards' 2 times. The wingnuts would cry "Media Bias!!!" if the media didn't equalize the rather unequal situation by showing 2 errors each.

That's precisely what's been happening since the debates began if not well before. After the first Presidential debate, for instance, Fox reported on some of Bush's questionable claims (alright, lies) about the situation in Iraq. He repeated demonstrably fallacious information on many many occassions. Fox reported one or two of those, and then reported the one or two times that Kerry misspoke (when he identified the KGB headquarters in "Treblinka Square" instead Lubyanka Square, or referred to the $200 Billion appropriated for the War by Congress as inaccurate because only $120 Billion of that has so far been spent.)

Those "errors" were reported as if they were equal, with both candidates being incorrect at some points in the debate. That sort of reporting paints an egregiously inaccurate assessment of the event.

Halperin's memo was right on the money as far as I'm concerned. Two inequal candidates do not deserve to be covered "equally". But the media has become so frightened of it's own shadow, that they are serving as equalizers for Bush/Cheney when Bush/Cheney deserves nothing of the kind from any sober and unbiased assessment of the facts and the way these campaigns are being run.

Sadly however, the media has boxed themselves in by running scared for years now. To the point where they won't likely even be able to rebuff Drudge's gross misinterpretation of Halperin's memo ("BOTH SIDES NOT 'EQUALLY ACCOUNTABLE'"??) effectively. I suppose that's where those of us with any sense of fairness and honesty and reason have to step in. Unfortunately, there's not all that many of us left with a voice that can be heard over the brilliantly orchestrated din of lies from the Right.

UPDATE: To give you an idea of the breathless coverage the wingnuts are giving to this non-story (apparently they only bothered to read the headline, not the actual memo). Look no further than this from the rightwing blog Power Line...

Sigh...If Drudge prints it...they will come.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall's take on this nonsense.