Network polls put McCain-Palin ten-plus points behind Obama-Biden and Brian Williams introduced Thursday's NBC Nightly News by asserting “some senior Republicans are getting edgy at the prospect of a long up hill climb in a short amount of time,” but Williams and other journalists may not be so confident of an Obama victory -- how else to explain NBC's decision to air hit piece Thursday evening about Sarah Palin's husband Todd? Or maybe it just reflects continued animosity.

With “Palin abused her power” on screen with a picture of Todd and Sarah Palin, from Alaska reporter John Larson related that in the “troopergate” probe “state investigators noted in their report the pressure Todd Palin used to try to get his brother-in-law fired, and that Governor Palin’s firing” of public safety commissioner Walter Monegan, “who resisted that pressure, was an abuse of power, though she did not break any laws.” Nice caveat there.

Larson framed his story around how, horror of horrors, “state employees testified 'he had significant influence' on government affairs, that he occupied the Governor's office at least half the time.” Larson intoned, as if it were some kind of new and damaging revelation: “In fact, in this, his first nationally televised interview” Monegan “told NBC News Todd attended the Governor's closed cabinet meetings.”

Rather than deliver a single revelation, the 24-hour cable news channel coughed up a reheated, overwrought and misleading story that seemed designed to yoke Sarah Palin and her husband to the most extreme secessionists in Alaska.

That's how Los Angeles Times's James Rainey characterized an October 14 effort by CNN's Rick Sanchez to portray Gov. Sarah Palin as a shady secessionist who would like to see Alaska break away from the United States. Sanchez even went as far as to raise the specter of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Rainey began his October 15 column, "CNN bid to tie Palin to secessionists is a stretch," by noting the Geraldo-like melodrama with which the network's Rick Sanchez teased the story of overblown political intrigue:

The mainstream media has resorted to attacking GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's husband Todd Palin.  At the bottom of the hour of Bill Press's radio show at 6am this morning, Press said the following:

PRESS: What's the difference between a secessionist and a terrorist? Isn't a secessionist just another form of a terrorist? Ask Abraham Lincoln...Let's find out what the "First Dude" was going to do in order to secede from the union. I tell you it wasn't going to be peaceful.

Has Bill Press lost it? The first glaring difference is Todd Palin never blew up innocent people or landmarks all over the country.  Comparing Todd Palin to Bill Ayers is just plain nonsense and disingenuous.

The New Republic associate editor, Eve Fairbanks, needs to send a royalty payment to her senior editor, Michelle Cottle. Actually, Fairbanks might as well bypass Cottle and send the payment directly to your humble correspondent since The New Republic senior editor ripped me off when she wrote that the Washington Post compared Todd Palin to Hillary Clinton just a half hour after I made the same suggestion. Since the Washington Post story never mentioned Hillary, where do you think Cottle got her story idea from? The following update to my September 22 blog post explains:

They say love conquers all and that might just be the case with Susan Estrich. The normally liberal columnist seems to be absolutely smitten with Todd Palin. Her recent column sounds more like a love note to him than a political analysis:

First Dude. That's what they call him in Alaska. It's OK. Todd's Ok. Whatever. He smiles at Greta Van Susteren. Not a touch of noblesse. More like plan old politesse. I always laugh a little when I see people who are very much not ordinary Americans in any respect (pay, fame, education or overall wealth, for starters) try to speak for them. "This is what ordinary Americans want," says someone whose only contact with them may be while his face is getting powdered for TV.

You can almost hear "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing" playing in the background as Susan  continues to verbally ogle Todd:

There may be only one truly regular guy, a guy regular enough that he doesn't begin to have the arrogance to believe he speaks for anyone other than himself, in this race. And therefore, of course, he does.

In stunningly self-centered, cruel fashion, Nicholas Provenzo, writer for the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism suggests that Sarah Palin’s decision to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome, is a financial burden that others are forced to suffer with.  

Provenzo, who has written opinion pieces for the Washington Times, Capitalism Magazine, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as being a guest on Bill Maher’s former show, Politically Incorrect, makes his case for “the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome.”

The full first paragraph of the piece which is circulating amidst the blogosphere reads (emphasis mine):

Remember all those months of the MSM building up the myth of Barack Obama, the Lightworker of unique spiritual powers whose image was frequently photoshopped to present his blessed head surrounded by a halo? Well, now Time magazine columnist, Joe Klein, is upset that Americans are supporting Sarah Palin because of another "myth" of a small town frontier America. Those who create the myths really shouldn't be complaining about what they perceive as myths but that is exactly what Klein does in his column (emphasis mine):