The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to see what the audiences of the various political shows knew about politics, and what they found goes against the conventional wisdom about whose audience is better informed about current events. With a simple three-question survey about politicians in high office, it turned out that the audiences of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity answered more questions correctly than fans of the "Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and CNN.

The quiz asked the names of two of the world's leaders and one party in power to determine what audience is most well informed. Survey participants were asked the names of the Secretary of State, the British Prime Minister, and the name of the party currently controlling the House of Representatives.

Video of Palin's second appearance -- on the "Weekend Update" segment -- follows below the fold:

Some reporters aren’t satisfied with claiming McCain and Palin are encouraging supporters to get violent. Mark Binker of the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record reports on how his colleague Joe Kilian was kicked in the leg by a Palin fan and is suggesting that people who peddle that "liberal media" message might be egging on violence against reporters:

After today I'm wondering -- and this is just wondering at this point -- whether Republicans aren't in some respect giving their supporters license for this sort of crap. If the story you peddle is that your guys are the good guys and all those who stand against them are the bad guys, and the "liberal media" is in that second column, might there be a message there – even if it is one that is misconstrued and carried to a stupid extreme in some cases?

There is a very obvious retort to this line of thinking: if Binker is right, than all the hostile news coverage against McCain (and much more extremely, Palin) encourages a "stupid extreme" on the left to get violent against the GOP ticket.

The story was eerily familiar. A minority female assaulted at or near a college campus. Protests are held and charges are made before all the facts are in. And the result was the same: hoax.

In the latest case the hoax was a supposed assault on a Muslim student at Elmhurst college in Illinois. First the initial report of this "assault" in the Chicago Sun-Times with this breathless sub-head: "HATE CRIME: Slur, Swastikas scrawled in her locker." Now the October 11 report without the slightest bit of skepticism entering reporter Dan Rozek's account:

A Muslim student attacked at Elmhurst College in what school officials described as a hate crime had found anti-Islamic slurs and a swastika scrawled in her locker a week earlier, police and students said Friday.

The 19-year-old sophomore told police a masked, male attacker struck her in the head with a handgun about 8:30 p.m. Thursday after she entered a restroom in the school's Schaible Science Center. She suffered a concussion.

Threatening graffiti -- "Kill the Muslims" -- was written on a mirror in the restroom, students and police said.

Has the election already taken place? No? Then somebody should tell Vogue. They’ve already declared Joe Biden as vice president.

A headline on the cover and for the corresponding feature story reads, “All the Vice President’s Women," referring to what the style magazine calls “four generations of Biden beauties.”

I agree the Biden women are beauties; I disagree Joe Biden is vice president (picture courtesy Vogue).

Brent Bozell's culture column this week focused on his attempts to take young 11-year-old son Reid to the multiuplex on a Saturday. He was

First, a gratingly long list of mediocre R-rated movies:

Blindness (rated R): Completely hopeless film about people catching an infectious disease of blindness and getting rounded up in a mental asylum.

Quarantine (R): Completely hopeless film about a TV news crew getting trapped in a Centers for Disease Control quarantine of a building where everybody catches a version of rabies and dies. (What is this, a trend?)

Burn After Reading (R): A dippy personal trainer gets caught up in a government plot, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and gets shot in the face, and so much for Brad Pitt.

Body of Lies (R): Leonardo di Caprio pretends to be a rugged CIA agent and we're lectured again about the moral rot of American foreign policy manipulators.

Before the New York Times published Saturday's 2500-word, front-page hit piece about Cindy McCain, an attorney representing the wife of the Arizona senator sent a letter to executive editor Bill Keller appealing to his "sense of fairness, balance and decency" to not run "another story about her."

In the correspondence, which has been posted in full by Time magazine's Mark Halperin (h/t NBer Bob Mc), attorney John Dowd chastised Keller for: not employing his "investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama;" not trying to "find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father," and; not interviewing Obama's "poor relatives in Kenya and determin[ing] why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here."

FoxNews.com is reporting further anger over this Times article being expressed by the McCain campaign (emphasis added, picture courtesy AP):

The mainstream media began a frenzied investigation of Joe the Plumber this week. His "high crime" wasn't anything he said. Instead Joe the Plumber has earned the ire of the MSM because of what Barack Obama said to him, namely that he wanted to "share the wealth." As a result of inadvertently revealing his collectivist yearnings to Joe the Plumber, the latter gentleman is having every last detail of his background investigated including his modest tax lien and the fact that (gasp!) his first name isn't really Joe. That last charge is actually quite laughable since there are probably millions of people in this country who don't use their first name (including your humble correspondent). Perhaps we should take a trip back in time and impeach President Thomas Woodrow Wilson for ditching his first name.

Keith Olbermann cowardly responded to the jokes John McCain made about him at Thursday's Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner by attacking Gov. Sarah Palin.

After showing some of the hysterical jibes made at the charity event by McCain and Barack Obama, the "Countdown" host on Friday picked up a microphone, and while doing an astoundingly poor impersonation of a nightclub comic, launched into a tremendously unfunny attack on both members of the Republican presidential ticket (video embedded right):

On Saturday, The Washington Post published a letter to the editor (on their "Free for All" page) that did a nice job poking the Post for their endorsement of Obama:  

Sen. Barack Obama has promised to bring change and hope. The Post's Oct. 17 endorsement editorial "Barack Obama for President" made it clear that he has already succeeded in bringing hope to The Post when it stated:

-- "We hope he would navigate between the amoral realism of some in his party and the counterproductive cocksureness of the current administration, especially in its first term."

-- "...we can only hope and assume that Mr. Obama would recognize the strategic importance of success in Iraq and adjust his plans."

-- "We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings."

With 18 days to go in the presidential race, Friday’s Today show lurched to the far left and actually devoted five minutes (and space on MSNBC.com) to leftist author Naomi Wolf and her theory that under President Bush, America is undergoing a "fascist shift."

Co-host Meredith Vieira treated Wolf with skepticism, questioning her assertions that we’re in danger of a "police state," or a standing army overlooking American citizens, suggesting she might be "fear-mongering" to get Barack Obama elected with theories of a McCain-Palin police state, just as the McCain campaign has been accused of exploiting fear. But if years ago, an author suggested President Clinton was leading us into dictatorship, would NBC offered them five minutes, or simply ignored it as undignified? Vieira offered Wolf a free pass to offer long passages of her argument, and the word "fascist" wasn’t used by either party, as Wolf presented herself as a nonpartisan and non-ideological defender of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

David Brooks, the "House Conservative" of the New York Times, should seriously consider putting his self-description as "conservative" in quotes at all times in order to comply with truth in packaging. I mean how conservative can you be when liberal sources are quoting you favorably, especially when you sound like, without quite saying so, you are endorsing Barack Obama? The liberal New Republic cites Brooks favorably for his almost endorsement of The One:

Has David Brooks Endorsed Obama? 

Not in so many words, but please continue:

Well, not exactly. After all, he has one paragraph in his column in Friday's Times in which he speculates that Obama might be reticent, stand-offish, ineffectual.

My oh my oh my what a wonderful Saturday of college football should be ahead of us. If today's schedule doesn't send a thrill up your leg, nothing will:

• No. 22 Vanderbilt at No. 10 Georgia. I know we've got Dawgs fans here. Can any of you point to the last game between these two teams that was this big?
• No. 16 Kansas at No. 4 Oklahoma. Does this have the possibility of being another HUGE Big 12 matchup like last week's Sooners-Horns classic?
• No. 12 Ohio State at No. 20 Michigan State. Did anyone point at this game in August as having so much meaning? This game has excitement dripping all over it!
• No. 11 Missouri at No. 1 Texas. Oh baby, the Horns better have their A-game plugged in, because the Tigers gotta be furious about how things ended last weekend, and they're looking to show the nation what they're really made of. This could be a lotta fun!

Moving from the gridiron, can the Rays close this thing out today, or are the Sox gonna do it again?

Anything else on folks' minds?

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: McCain calls Obama's tax plan socialist.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Saturday accused Democratic rival Barack Obama of favoring a socialistic economic approach by supporting tax cuts and tax credits McCain says would merely shuffle wealth rather than creating it. "At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," McCain said in a radio address. "They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Sen. Obama. Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut; it's just another government giveaway."

Although most right-thinking and impartial Americans would have to agree with McCain's position, isn't ita little late in the campaign to start saying this? Why didn't McCain and Palin hammer on this right from the beginning of September rather than waiting until two weeks before Election Day to tell the voters the truth about Obama? Did it really take a plumber to wake the Republican presidential candidate up to what most of us have known since Obama gave his keynote speech at the 2004 DNC?

Or is it better late than never?

Talk about sleazy tactics! Wizbang has obtained a copy of a Facebook e-mail sent by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor in order to snoop into the private life of John McCain's youngest daughter, Bridgette. Here is that Kantor message via Wizbang (emphasis mine):

September 29 at 7:21pm

Report Message

I saw on facebook that you went to Xavier, and if you don't mind, I'd love to ask you some advice about a story. I'm a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I'm reaching out to fellow parents at her kids' schools. My understanding is that some of her older kids went to Brophy/Xavier, but I'm trying to figure out what school her 16 year old daughter Bridget attends-- and a few people said it was PCDS. Do you know if that's right? Again, we're not really reporting on the kids, just seeking some fellow parents who can talk about what Mrs. McCain is like.

Also, if you know anyone else who I should talk to-- basically anyone who has encountered Mrs. McCain and might be able to share impressions-- that would be great.

Thanks so much for any help you can give me.

Someone should explain to ABC: it ain't "dirty" if it's true.  GMA got the collective vapors this morning over the robo-calls the RNC and McCain campaign are making, informing voters of Barack Obama's close association with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers.  

In GMA's book, there's no real difference between these calls—which Cokie Roberts alluded to as "dirtier" tactics—and the calls made against McCain during the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary.

Except there is a difference.  A big, fundamental one: what's said in the current calls is true.  Obama did work closely with Ayers. What was said in the 2000 calls against McCain in South Carolina was false: he didn't father a black child out of wedlock. He and wife Cindy adopted a Bangladeshi child.

View video here.

One can picture Queen Victoria huffily declaring, "We are not amused," when reading this Margaret Carlson column about Joe the Barber in Bloomberg. Carlson appears to be upset that a "mere" plumber is steering the campaign away from the direction she wants it to follow (emphasis mine):

The most dispiriting thing to come out of the debate was the morning after. I woke to see Joe Wurzelbacher's street in Holland, Ohio, lit up like Times Square with network and cable satellite trucks clogging the place.

I thought the press was beyond 23 mentions of Joe the Plumber by one candidate and three by the other, while Asian markets were dropping 10 percent and the Dow has been diving.

Unless he starts making courtesy calls to fix the running toilets of the journalists making him famous, let's relegate Joe the Plumber back to the playroom with Bob the Builder or the 15- minute hall of fame with Harry and Louise and Ross Perot's crazy aunt in the attic.

The tabloids and celebrity entertainment programs were ablaze with the latest news that Madonna and her British movie director husband Guy Ritchie were getting divorced after eight years of marriage. Since this was Madonna, the commercial timing of this second mangled marriage was excellent, in time to promote her latest concert tour and her debut at directing a movie, titled "Filth and Wisdom," about a rock singer working as a cross-dressing dominatrix.

But if Madonna really wanted to save her marriage, she could have seen the movie "Fireproof," the new movie starring Kirk Cameron as a firefighter who tries to save his marriage by getting rid of his selfishness and recognizing his need for Jesus. This might not seem like Madonna’s kind of popcorn movie, but it sells an absolutely revolutionary message: that love is not merely a feeling, some giggles and a good time, but a choice a person makes, a set of actions a person takes, to love someone regardless of how much they are rewarded in return.

The movie’s deepest theme reminded me of a passage from C. S. Lewis that my wife likes: