Following the Obama campaign spin, the network reporters and analysts were upset by John McCain, at one moment in the second presidential debate on Tuesday night, referring to Barack Obama as “that one.” CBS's Jeff Greenfield asserted “there is going to be clearly a major headline soundbite” and insisted “those two words are going to be what the water cooler conversation is tomorrow. Was it demeaning? Was it an insult?” Katie Couric turned to a group of “undecided voters” for their reaction to the phrase. One man “thought it was a little bit childish” and another “undecided” man declared: “I'm really tired of the last eight years of for us or against us and to me that showed that side of McCain coming out and the picky and childish and we've had eight years of that.”

On CNN a little past 11 PM EDT, reporter Suzanne Malveaux compared it to Bill Clinton's characterization of Monica Lewinsky: “It's like 'that woman,' you know, that we've heard 'that woman,' I mean a lot of people are saying that was the kind of language that was very condescending.” A few minutes later, Democratic hack Paul Begala slimed Sarah Palin as a racist, citing the Associated Press and how “they said her attack on this whole Bill Ayers thing was 'racially-tinged.' That's not what a Democrat said, that's what the Associated Press said.” There's a difference? MSNBC viewers heard Chris Matthews pleased by Obama's “wonderful smile” before he charged McCain's smile “has a somewhat menacing quality.”

Audio: MP3 audio (1:25, 450 Kb) which matches the video above of CBS's "undecided" voters.

Continue the debate discussion here or start your own topics...

In the post debate "analysis" tonight after the second presidential debate, Chris Matthews of MSNBC proved once again that he is in such rapture about Barack Obama that it cannot be believed. Tonight, Matthews cast McCain in the role of Snidely Whiplash or some such thing thing because of his "menacing smile." Yet, according to the sycophantic Matthews, Obama's is "debonair."

Mary Katharine Ham reports what Matthews said tonight:

On his PBS talk show after the debate Tuesday night, Charlie Rose devoted most of the first 20 minutes of the show to top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. He claimed "We also invited a representative from the McCain campaign, but they were unable to do so this evening." Neither Rose nor the McCain campaign could find a person to match 20 minutes for Obama?

As for the pundits, New Yorker magazine editor (and former Washington Post reporter) David Remnick blasted Sarah Palin for going "negative in the lowest way possible," and said her slection "really is turning out to be a great misery." He said the race is turning strongly to Obama, "and deservedly so."

Remnick pulled no punches:

McCain began the debate in a sarcastic and frustrated mood. He used the phrase ‘he and his cronies,’ ‘that guy over there’ – you can tell there was a real antipathy there that lasted from beginning to end. Obama was collected. He was eloquent. He was clear. He was unfazed by attacks. He gave the message that he wouldn’t brook attacks that would go personal. So I think he won this debate in dramatic fashion.

It seems like only yesterday when Enron and Worldcom collapsed. Throughout these ordeals our national media labored long and hard to paint Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers as the face of Capitalism Corrupted while connecting the dots between President Bush and Enron’s "Kenny Boy" Lay, in the effort to demonstrate that corruption in action.

Now it is not a couple of business behemoths in trouble; it’s the entire economy that is teetering over a credit crisis brought on in part by corrupt government-sponsored enterprises and liberal politicians. So where are those same journalists now?

They’re out there finding fault only with the evil private sector. The mushrooming federal government and the stewards of its never-ending expansion cannot be questioned.

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Left-wing, faux documentary filmmaker Michael Moore famously announced late last year that his newest film would be a "free" download on the Internet. He claimed that his new film was a "free" gift to all his fans. Apparently, he didn't really mean "all" his fans, though. It turns out that his lawyers have sent out a raft of letters to downloading services like PirateBay.org, TorrentFreak and BitTorrent to cease and desist allowing downloads for anyone outside of the U.S. and Canada because he wants to sell the film to foreign markets. I guess "free" is in the mind of the beholder?

John McCain and Barack Obama are squaring off tonight at 9pm ET. Will the debate prove influential in the presidential race? Any media bias predictions?

Discuss the main event here or join our live chat.

Over video simply showing Barack Obama walking down the steps from his airplane, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric on Tuesday night juxtaposed how Obama “was given a police escort to his hotel,” as if that’s anything unusual for a presidential nominee under standard Secret Service protection, with how “in recent days, he's been under a non-stop verbal assault from Sarah Palin.” So the Governor of Alaska is a threat to Obama’s personal safety? Couric never explained why she decided to highlight the police escort when Obama and McCain, as well as Palin and Joe Biden, get them every day:

The economy will likely dominate tonight's presidential debate. John McCain arrived in Nashville last night while Barack Obama flew in earlier today and was given a police escort to his hotel. In recent days, he's been under a non-stop verbal assault from Sarah Palin. But are her criticisms accurate? Wyatt Andrews, now, with a Reality Check.

Audio: MP3 audio clip (25 seconds, 100 Kb)

In his weekly column, New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt ludicrously argued that Barack Obama has gotten tougher coverage since January 2007 (when Obama entered the race) than John McCain:

By my count, The Times has published more tough articles on Obama, 20, than on McCain, 13, since the beginning of last year.

The Times has never filed any story targeting Obama that remotely approaches the mendacity of its February 21 hit piece alleging a McCain affair with a telecommunications lobbyist (Hoyt himself at the time said the Times was wrong to run the affair allegations). Also, Hoyt's narrow definition of bias helpfully eliminates stories with asides about McCain's temper, or constant mentions of McCain's "gaffes."

Taking liberal media audacity to higher levels, John Heilemann would have you believe that the loss of support from liberal journalists is itself evidence the wheels are falling off the McCain campaign.  Heilemann recently wrote about a "shift" in the attitudes and opininos of the media away from John McCain and towards Barack Obama. His examples are, well, typical.

Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.

By a show of hands, how many of you knew these guys were, as Heilemann reports, "former McCain admirers?"

Barack Obama received a valuable campaign contribution from the New York Times on Saturday: a front-page piece reviewing Obama's lengthy association with the ’60s and ’70s Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The Times' key sentence asserted: "The two men do not appear to have been close."

The Times' stamp of disapproval was all the rest of the media needed to reject the idea that Obama's dealings with Ayers should matter to voters, as Sarah Palin dared to suggest over the weekend. ABC's David Wright on Sunday called Palin's attack on Obama "incendiary," while CBS's Bob Schieffer (moderator of the final presidential debate on October 15) called it a "down and dirty" move, adding that Palin "took after Barack Obama in a style reminiscent of Spiro Agnew."

SARAH PALIN! Sloooowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch...

Tony Norman in his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column sounded like he was performing an old routine from an Abbott and Costello movie only instead of "Pokomoko," the words that set him off were, "Sarah Palin." It's hard to get upset with Tony because his complaints about Palin are so exaggerated with no relation to reality that he comes off as clownish. So let us now observe the Tony Norman PDS comedy show (my emphasis):

Those of us with vivid memories of middle school have seen Gov. Sarah Palin's type before. She was the girl who was always the first to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and the last to stop instigating fights in the cafeteria.

Slowly I turned...step by step... Oops! Sorry for cutting in on your routine Tony. You're on a roll so please continue:

Fact-checking politicians seems to be the journalistic "in" thing to do this campaign season. Aside from the self-aggrandizing nature of such pronouncements, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with the concept.

The devil is in the details, however. Over at the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto notes that these esoteric fact check stories too often end up as opinion pieces criticizing the policies or rhetoric of politicians.

In more cases than not, it's Republicans who bear the brunt of such "corrections," simply because truth in politics is often a highly subjective thing. Taranto focuses on one particular fact check by USA Today criticizing a John McCain ad for quoting Barack Obama out of context:

On Tuesday's "Good Morning America," co-host Diane Sawyer fondly reminisced with Democratic strategist James Carville about "War Room," the 15-year-old political documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign. Opening the segment with Carville, one of the film's stars, she fawned, "It's become like revisiting a big moment in the Super Bowl. Going back to 1992, when Bill Clinton and a team of strategists in a war room unseated a sitting president."

Later, after playing a clip of Carville as he congratulated the Clinton team for their hard work, Sawyer cooed, "When you look back, can you believe it still? Can you believe it yet?" Oddly, one person who also starred in the film, and is featured on the DVD cover, wasn't cited in the segment. George Stephanopoulos, the former top aide to Bill Clinton-tuned ABC journalist, somehow escaped mention.

Note: This serves to at least partially answer ABC's David Wright's idiotic question.

Bob Bennett is a man of integrity, and the Democratic half of the political Bennett Brothers. He appeared last night on Mark Levin's nationally syndicated radio show to debunk the media myth built-up around Arizona Senator John McCain's role in the Keating Five mess circa the late 1980s and early 1990s.

(Brother Bill served as Secretary of President Ronald Reagan's Department of Education and Director of President George H.W. Bush's Office of National Drug Control Policy, and is now a nationally syndicated radio host in his own right, of "Bill Bennett's Morning in America.")

Bob Bennett is an attorney, and was at the time of the Keating Five scandal hired by the Senate Ethics Committee as Special Counsel to lead the investigation into what had happened. After over a year of exhaustive examination, Bennett recommended that Sen. McCain (and Sen. John Glenn of Ohio) be exonerated of all charges having to do with the Keating scandal. The ethics committee, which was majority Democratic, rejected Bennett's recommendation.

From the Washington Post's The Trail (by Michael Abramowitz), we have the following:

MSNBC's David Shuster knows how to treat a lady right. Unless that lady is Rep. Marsha Blackburn. Last year we noted how he played a gotcha game with the Tennessee Republican over the death of a soldier he mistakenly thought was from her district. He subsequently apologized.

Today the MSNBC anchor put Blackburn on the spot by calling on her to defend the McCain campaign in light of inappropriate remarks made by random people attending their rallies:

DAVID SHUSTER: Congresswoman, as the tone gets nastier on both sides, I want to ask you about some things that were shouted to John McCain and Sarah Palin yesterday during their rallies. First, here's John McCain raising questions about Barack Obama yesterday in New Mexico.

Sen. JOHN McCAIN (R-Ariz.): In short, who is the real Barack Obama?

Earlier this year, the media trotted out story after story of high gas price hardship as oil climbed to a record-high $147 a barrel back in July. One analyst even predicted in May that oil would reach $300 a barrel.

But, now that a financial mess has struck the markets, oil has fallen from $140 to right around $90 a barrel on Oct. 7. During months leading up to its peak, many were forecasting oil in excess of $200 by the end of 2008 and even $300 within five years. But the economic slowdown has caused the rally in commodity markets to cease, as Equidex President Phillip Gotthelf pointed out on Bloomberg TV on Oct. 7.