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In the 8:30AM half hour of Tuesday’s CBS Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez led live coverage of Barack Obama voting in Chicago and asked Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer: "Bob, how must he be feeling right now?" A choked up Schieffer replied: "Well, I mean, this is a -- this is a remarkable moment in American history. Stop and think about this, 150 years ago there were 31 million people who lived in this country, 4 million of those people were slaves, 4 million people. And, today, here you have an African-American who may be elected president of this country. This is not -- people keep talking about the American people may be ready to turn a page, but it's not just a political page, this is a page of American history." Rodriguez agreed: "Absolutely."

Co-host Harry Smith joined the coverage and actually wondered if Obama was voting for himself: "I'm wondering, I would love to ask him afterwards whether or not he voted for himself...Because having voted in school elections and stuff like that, we were taught as kids sometimes you vote for the other guy because that's how -- that's how -- it's an honorable thing to say that 'I honor your presence here. This was a battle well fought.' And I would be very interested to know whether or not he voted for himself." A realistic Schieffer replied: "I'm betting he did." Smith responded: "Yeah, I'm betting he did. I'm just bringing up a question."

We began with sixteen of the most overtly biased journalists towards Illinois Democratic Senator and Presidential nominee Barack Obama.

You, the media's biggest fans, watched the videos and read the excerpts and cast your ballots for your selections.  

First for the Enamored Eight, then the Infatuated Four and the Dynamic Biased Duo.

And now the moment has arrived, when we announce your choice as the Media's Most Valuable Partisan (MVP), the most pro-Obama reporter of them all.

And that alleged journalist is....

An Obama victory could boost conservative talk show hosts according to CNBC's "Squawk Box" this election day. The show was more skeptical over the future of left-wing talk. Always with the rhetorical questions, Joe Kernen got things started:

Who is going to win in terms of the cable wars? ... Are we going to become totally nonpartisan now? Do you think that we will be able to bury all of our divisions and there won't be any incendiary cable shows anymore? Who wins if Obama wins? What happens to Olbermann? What's Olbermann going to do, or Maddow?

Co-host Carl Quintanilla suggested "television feeds on conflict" and co-host Rebecca Quick followed up by adding that syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh "has done better" when there are Democrats in power.

Kernen said that Limbaugh and Fox News Channel and syndicated radio host Sean Hannity both signed new deals and an Obama win would be "great for them."

If the Republicans had a few more spokesmen like Haley Barbour, the political landscape might look a lot different.  The Mississippi governor's down-home good humor and razor-sharp wit are a formidable combination. Barbour's killer combo of skills was on display on this evening's Hardball.  When Chris Matthews challenged his criticism of Obama's tax credit plan, Barbour good-naturedly backed him down with an impressive disquisition on New Deal history.  When he was through, Matthews had to admit that Haley was right.

I'd encourage people to view the video, not only for the entertainment value, but as a case study of how to defeat a member of the liberal media.

Wall Street is definitely watching all those polls the networks keep touting.

CNBC's Erin Burnett told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Wall Street was predicting that Sen. Barack Obama will win the presidency, but an upset from Sen. John McCain might boost it:

This market has priced in Obama, has not priced in McCain. Some people say that if McCain were to have an upset and win the market might get a big pop, who knows, but down here the conventional wisdom is, is that Obama has been priced into stocks.

When asked to explain the term "priced in" Burnett said, "It just means the market expects it. So, if Obama wins the market probably isn't going to do anything one way or the other."

The Nobel hasn't conferred any classiness on Paul Krugman.  Dancing on the GOP's grave this morning in his NYT column, the newly-minted laureate impugns the party of Lincoln as "a haven for racists and reactionaries."

According to Krugman [file photo], tomorrow's election will purge the Republican congressional delegation of some of its more moderate members, leaving it even more "extreme."

The only evidence Krugman adduces in support of his Republican-are-racists slur is that GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia "observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that 'the other folks are voting.'”  Where's the racism, given that 90+% of African-Americans are expected to vote for Obama and presumably for Chambliss's Dem opponent?

View video after the jump of Joe Scarborough on today's Morning Joe ripping Krugman as a "shrill, silly, partisan cartoon-character" who takes his cues from the left-wing kookasphere.

Mark Whitaker, head of the NBC News DC bureau, got off today's unintentional laugh line when he described Barack Obama as having "lifted himself up from the streets of Hawaii."

Oh those mean streets of Hawaii. You know, the sort pictured here at the Punahou school that Obama attended from 5-12th grade.  While attending Punahou, Obama lived with his grandparents.  Readers will recall that grandma Dunham was . . . a vice-president of the Bank of Hawaii.

View video here.

If Team McCain needed some "bulletin-board material"—the kind of outrageous taunt from the opposition a coach will pin up in the locker-room to inspire his troops—they got if from Charlie Cook tonight.  So confident is the pollster of an Obama victory, he's proclaimed that if McCain wins, he'll go to work bagging groceries or behind a fast-food counter.

Cook was a guest on this evening's Race for the White House.  It was in looking at the Electoral College map with host David Gregory that he made his super-sized pledge.

View video here.

In 1995, Barack Obama gave a TV interview to discuss the memoir he wrote, "Dreams From My Father." Philip Klein at The American Spectator picked up on this back in August, but the video is making rounds again now. Obama spoke very highly of his then pastor Rev.Jeremiah Wright(my empahasis added:)

 OBAMA: In times of economic scarcity, ahm, generally, ahh, the politicians in this country, right now, ahh, want to look for scapegoats, want to organize around race, as opposed to around principle, and around values, ahh, and I think that's a mistake, and I think that can be countered, but it's gonna require the kinds of grassroots mobilization, ahh, and, and the kinds of work at a local level that I think, ahh, I talk about a lot in, in those chapters on Chicago.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful man there, Reverend Wright?

OBAMA: Right! [ED: WRIGHT ?!?] And...

INTERVIEWER: Yeah...

OBAMA: ...ahh, who is, who is, ahh, my pastor, and, ahh, he is a wonderful man, and I think it, ahh, that's an example of, ahh, he's a pastor of a, of a large congregation in Chicago, and one of the interesting things that I discovered in my journey to discover...

INTERVIEWER: Mmm-hmm...

OBAMA: ...what my identity is, and who my father is, is also discovering sort of, ahh, my own faith, which, which is not, ahh, necessarily a traditional faith - I don't come out of an institutionalized religious setting, but, ahh, ahh, what becomes important to me is I work with, ahh, churches in...

INTERVIEWER: Mmm-hmm...

By the second half of Rachel Maddow's interview with Barack Obama last night on MSNBC, the question Maddow kept avoiding became conspicious.

Surely the earnest MSNBC cable host would ask Obama something, anything about Iraq.

After all, Iraq is the main reason Obama became the Democrats' candidate for president and not Clinton, not Biden, Edwards or Kerry. They all voted for the war and later tried in vain to explain it away. Angry McGovernites who regained control of the party would have none of it and wasted little time anointing Obama presumptive nominee right out of the gate in Iowa.

Take Iraq out of the equation and Obama's just a freshman senator still summoning the nerve to ask McCain the time of day.

"Good Morning America" reporter Claire Shipman on Friday asked the author of a new biography on Michelle Obama how the candidate's wife deals with her husband being "lusted after by all of these women out there" on the campaign trail. While talking to "Michelle" author Liz Mundy, Shipman cooed, "And, of course, it's wonderful, but not always easy when your husband becomes a political rock star overnight."

As though the ABC correspondent were reading from a press release, she opened the segment by fawning: "And over the years, Michelle Obama in her personal journey has achieved a remarkable feat. She's carved a role for herself a path that both embraces and transcends race." Later, Shipman insisted, "An incredible journey that even more than her husband's is emblematic of the country's racial transformation." At no point, did Shipman, who once rhapsodized about the "fluid poetry" of the presidential candidate, discuss any of Michelle Obama's gaffes during the 2008 campaign, such as her famous comment in February that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."

Breaking down the front door of a suspected al-Qaeda stronghold in Fallujah took great courage. But even that fearless feat pales in comparison to the dangerous mission that Willie Geist undertook. The intrepid member of the Morning Joe crew ventured out onto the sidewalks of Manhattan's Upper West Side wearing . . . a McCain-Palin T-shirt, trying to drum up support for the Republican ticket. (h/t readers BondPlainBond and Steve.)

As Willie explained, it was all a good-natured goof. But the West Siders for the most part lived up to their stereotype of, as Willie described it, "a monolithic block of elitists," scorning Geist for his gall.

CBS's "The Early Show" got an early start on the grumbling Oct. 30.

CBSNews.com and "Early Show" co-host Julie Chen warned viewers about flying the "pricey skies" this "hardly festive" holiday season because airfares have gone "way up." Chen said fares were "absolutely going through the roof."

Chen served up the numbers:

I want to put up two graphics that show how much prices have increased in the last year. To fly from New York to Miami the current average fare is $363 round-trip ... Now last year the same trip cost on average $321, that's 13 percent higher than last year. And to fly from Los Angeles to Dallas, Fort Worth airport, the current average is $391 round-trip. Last year that same trip cost on average $341, that's 15 percent higher than last year. Do you see any signs of airfare prices changing direction?

Amy Ziff, the editor-at-large of Travelocity, qualified Chen's numbers by saying those figure only tracked Thanksgiving specific airfare and opposed Chen's assumption that airfares were unusually high:

On Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez talked to Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer about Obama’s Wednesday night campaign infomercial and Schieffer offered rave reviews: "...this was something we haven't seen the like of in American Politics...It reminded me so much of the commercials that Ronald Reagan ran in 1984, the ‘Morning in America’...What Barack Obama’s message was last night, ‘things are not so good, but take heart, because we can make it okay.’ I thought it was very, very effective...it was a very effective piece of campaign advertising."

Following Rodriguez’s discussion with Schieffer, co-host Harry Smith talked with Washington Post media critic and CNN contributor, Howard Kurtz, about the commercial. Kurtz’s review was a bit more mixed: "This wasn't a 60-second ad. It wasn't a "Morning America" ad by Reagan, it was a show, and as a show it had to draw people in. I think it did a pretty good job of that, but as I said, at times it was a bit over the top." Earlier, Smith asked Kurtz: "What did you not like?" and Kurtz replied: "Well, for example, Maggie mentioned the faux Oval Office at the beginning, a lot of people, I think are going to find that a tad presumptuous-" Smith interrupted: "The Oval Office is not brown. It doesn't -- I don't think the Oval Office is brown, but go ahead." Kurtz pointed out: "Look at that tree in the window, it looks just like the South Lawn, he's got the flag." As Kurtz mentioned, in her discussion with Schieffer, Rodriguez observed: "...it opens with him standing in an office that some people thought looked like the Oval Office."

"I hear that they were originally going to do an hour of just glowing media clips from major talking heads, but they couldn't pare it down to a half hour," MRC Director of Communications Seton Motley quipped to Fox News Channel's Steve Doocy about Sen. Barack Obama's Oct. 29 half hour-long paid advertisement that ran on NBC, CBS, and Fox network stations.

"I didn't see anything new that really needed to be told last night.... To see if it's effective, let's see what the 'Pushing Daisies' ratings were," Motley added, referring to the program in the 8 p.m. Wednesday time slot on ABC, the one broadcast network which didn't carry the Obama informercial.

Though members of the mainstream media seem to have noticed in recent days that the radical, thoroughly corrupt left-wing group ACORN exists, the MSM are still accepting ACORN's word that it is strictly nonpartisan.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the MSM continue to churn out stories about alleged "voter suppression" (yes, it exists, but it is a pretty minor thing, especially when compared to ACORN's widespread electoral fraud), ACORN's interim organizer in chief Bertha Lewis has removed any remaining doubt about which political party ACORN supports.

Lewis is featured in a video posted on YouTube by an ACORN affiliate,Working Families Party. Says Lewis:

The Media Research Center's Director of Communications and NewsBusters.org Contributing Editor Seton Motley appeared on the Fox News Channel's America's Election HQ with Megyn Kelley to discuss the Los Angeles Times refusing to release a video of Illinois Democratic Senator and Presidential nominee Barack Obama attending the apparently anti-Israel going-away party for anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi in April 2003.

The Times did write a story about it at the time, but recently knowledge of the tape's existence came to light and they have steadfastly refused to release it.

Motley pointed out that this is but the latest in a long list of things potentially damaging to Sen. Obama that the media has obfuscated or outright ignored in their coverage of the Presidential race, including his relationships with Khalidi, remorseless domestic terrorist William Ayers, his anti-American pastor and self-described "mentor" and "spiritual advisor" of two decades Jeremiah Wright and convicted felon Tony Rezko.

On Wednesday's "Good Morning America," reporter Claire Shipman used a test designed by a liberal professor to interrogate the supposedly unconscious racist views of a group of undecided voters. After taking the complicated quiz, which involved linking words with colors, Shipman grilled the men and women about whether negative advertising had changed their view of Senator Barack Obama. "Anyone here have a sense that he is arrogant," she challenged." Shipman followed up, "Anybody think he's uppity?"

The ABC correspondent, who once cooed over the "fluid poetry" of Obama, wasn't dissuaded by the instance that none of voters thought of the Democrat that way. She solemnly intoned, "But in fact, although 'ready' and 'calm' were in the top five [test results], 'uppity,' that classic southern expression drenched in racial overtones, was the number one word subconsciously associated with Barack Obama." And at no point did Shipman mention that Professor Drew Weston of Emory University, the co-designer of this test, is a liberal who bashed Senator John McCain and asserted the Republican's only chance to victory was "the low road."

H/t reader Melody. Forget "what has he done for me lately?" How about: "what has he ever done?"  Columbia professor and Obama fan Jeffrey Sachs was effectively stumped when Joe Scarborough put that question to him on today's Morning Joe. Sachs is author of Common Wealth, a title that should send shivers down the spine in these days of redistributionism in the air.

It was towards the end of Sachs's appearance during the 6 AM EDT hour that Joe hit him with the "extra credit" question.

If Obama wins on Tuesday night, Chris Matthews's mocking this morning of the notion that the polls are tightening will be soon forgotten.  But if McCain pulls off the upset, Matthews's smirking triumphalism will take its place in the halls of journalistic hubris near the famous photo of Harry Truman holding up the Dewey Defeats Truman front page.

Just before Matthews came on, Andrea Mitchell ended her set-up segment by mentioning that the McCain campaign had released internal polls showing the race tied in the battleground states.  When Meredith Vieira opened the Matthews interview by asking him to comment, the Hardball host went into full mock mode.

Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR—a self-described progressive media watch group—now a professor of independent media at Ithaca College, invited me to address his class of student bloggers this afternoon.  Asked to name some of the fairer MSM journalists, I included David Gregory on my short list.  That could understandably come as a surprise to those who remember Gregory from his days as NBC's chief White House correspondent, when he earned the ire of the Bush administration for his often-aggressive style.  But I've found that Gregory plays it pretty much down the middle in his new role as host of Race for the White House on MSNBC.  

By coincidence, on this evening's show Gregory vindicated my confidence with some tough questioning of an Obama surrogate on the issue of taxes and spending.  Gregory went so far as to suggest that Obama's indication that he might not press for immediate implementation of tax increases on higher earners makes McCain's case. Gregory's guest was Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  When Van Hollen suggested Obama might postpone his tax-increase plan, Gregory moved in . . .

View video here.

Bob Shrum has made an addition to the growing list of things you can't say about Obama, because it's racist: don't you dare suggest Obama's never done anything hard.

Dem Shrum issued his diktat while debating Ed Rogers, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses, on today's Hardball. Shrum seized on and distorted Rogers' statement, manifestly made in the political sense, that Obama had "never done one hard thing," to play the race card.

View video here.

Are you getting tired of being told that you're a racist if you vote for John McCain?

Well, former NBA star Charles Barkley basically told Campbell Brown that on CNN Monday, and went so far as saying: "The only way they can win this election is make it about race. That's the only way they can win it."

Barkley also told Brown that "the polls are flat-out useless" because "most people who are racists, they're not going to answer the question correctly" (video embedded right, transcript provided by CNN.com):

Sometimes former CEOs have a reason to be downbeat when they make predictions.

Former Chairman and CEO of Citigroup Sanford Weill told CBS's "The Early Show" Oct. 28 that unemployment would hit 9 percent and that Wall Street CEOs "didn't deserve bonuses this year." It went something like this:

Well, I think we've set in motion a whole series of events that is going to make the economy really, really bad over the short term. I think we are going to see the biggest drop that we've seen in GDP. I think we are going to see unemployment go up to about 9 percent.

Weill said that a year from now things would be a lot better, but still was critical of the Federal Reserve for not acting sooner:

Well the media has officially gotten cocky when they start predicting that the reddest of red states could be in play for Barack Obama, and that's precisely what NBC's Ron Mott did on Tuesday's "Today" show, when he cheered that Texas, "May be surprisingly competitive." [audio excerpt available here]

In a report on early voting, Mott noted the long lines for those willing to participate in early voting and celebrated: 

So far Democratic voters appear to be the ones most willing to wait, and that could spell good news for Senator Barack Obama who's encouraged supporters, including his legion of newly registered young voters, to take advantage of early voting in 32 states and they've answered the call.

Then a little later, before throwing it back to "Today" anchor Meredith Vieira, Mott concluded the story with this overly confident observation:

Polls here in Texas give Senator McCain a relatively comfortable advantage but Democrats are nonetheless optimistic. They point to record turnout that we've seen so far, and a record number of registered voters, 13.5 million, as two signs perhaps that Texas may be surprisingly competitive this time next week. Meredith?

The following is the full story as it was aired on the October 28, "Today" show:

 ***UPDATE: See Below The Fold

CBS 3 Philadelphia interviewed Senator Joe Biden last Thursday, and he was none too pleased with the line of questioning.

Co-anchors Chris May and Angela Russell asked about Barack Obama's "spreading the wealth" remark and about a Washington Times report concerning Biden campaign cash donations going to Biden family members for campaign services.

Like the most recent interview with Orlando's WFTV's Barbara West, Biden is visibly annoyed and blows off questions as nonsense.:

An unintentionally hilarious assertion was made by Alaska State Senator Hollis French on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC cable show Friday night.

Maddow and French were discussing the so-called Troopergate scandal and Gov. Sarah Palin's alleged grudge in firing former Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan for not reopening an investigation of a state trooper who went through a nasty divorce with Palin's sister.

Hollis, a Democrat who led the state legislature's investigation into Palin's actions in firing Monegan last July, cited "severe logical fallacies" in claims made by Palin and her husband Todd, including the Palins' request for reduced security despite their assertions that Wooten was a rogue cop.

Then came the coup de grace from French:

Stop and think about, what good does it do to fire a trooper if you really think he's dangerous?

MRC Director of Communications Seton Motley appeared on Fox News Channel on October 26 to discuss the Obama campaign's pushback against the little media scrutiny it does receive:

MOTLEY: You had the American Issues Project in Houston run an ad about Obama's connection to Bill Ayers and they wrote a letter to the Justice Department asking that the American Issues Project and their contributors be investigated. So it makes you worry going forward if they're writing letters to ask the Justice [Department] now, what will an Obama administration do when they are in control of the Justice Department with people who ask questions they don't like?

Fox News anchor Eric Shawn asked Motley about the Obama campaign's pushback against a Florida TV station for an interview conducted by WFTV's Barbara West, whom Shawn noted once worked under Peter Jennings.

"What you've got here is a situation of the bias by commission at work where they are just promoting Obama at every opportunity, and then the bias by omission which is even more egregious, which is refusing to challenge him on anything," Media Research Center President Brent Bozell argued on the October 27 "Fox and Friends."

Bozell appeared on the Fox News Channel morning show to discuss an MRC study showing the broadcast networks by a 3:1 margin attack McCain ads for factual errors over Obama ad inaccuracies.

The NewsBusters publisher also discussed the Obama campaign shutting out a Florida TV station from access to interviews after a news anchor asked Sen. Joe Biden about charges that Sen. Barack Obama's policies were "Marxist" being predicated on "spread[ing] the wealth around.":

Imagine that a week before a presidential election, a radio interview surfaced in which the Republican candidate had called for, say, the abolition of Social Security. Now imagine the broadcast networks' reaction to that nugget: "We interrupt regularly-scheduled programming for this Breaking News," followed by 24/7 coverage with talking heads pondering the devastating impact on America's seniors, the overall economy, the future of Western civilization, etc. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman would be booked from now till election day, offering his pained pronouncements.

But how do those same networks react when a radio interview [YouTube after the jump] surfaces of Barack Obama in a call for the redistribution of wealth, in which he laments the Supreme Court's insufficient radicalism in pursuing redistribution and refers to the civil rights movement's failure to develop a better strategy to bring about wealth redistribution as a "tragedy?

Insert cricket-chirp soundtrack here.