One particular reader post qualifies as evidence that many recommendations do not necessarily make a thread good.

The diarist begins this way:

Wasn't it Schmidt, McCain's new hit man, who produced the "Call me" ad in Tennessee?

So doesn't simple logic dictate that Schmidt's recent inclusion in the McCain inner circle, followed closely by the appearance of this blond-bimbo celebrity ad are quite closely connected?

No. What simple logic dictates is that your premises must be true in order to yield a sound conclusion. And as we are told by Taylor Marsh in a 2006 article critical of those who politically assassinated Ford, those responsible for the production of the ad were Terry Nelson and Scott Howell.

I suggest that my fellow TPM readers/writers stop making things up.

testing

TPM founder Joshuah Micah Marshall said yesterday that the new McCain ad--comparing Obama to celebrities Britnay Spears and Paris Hilton-- sought to imply that Obama has a "taste for young white women."

Of course, Marshall did not provide any reasoning whatsoever to explain how he came to that conclusion, or where in the ad the possibility of Obama being attracted to white women is even hinted. Go ahead, readers. See the ad and be your own judge.

Inventing this kind of BS worked against Hillary Clinton, because virtually everyone in the media, left, center and right, hated her, and refused to ask the likes of Marshall to lay out the premises behind their arguments.

But these are not the primaries. The corporate media no longer feels compelled to play dumb, since Marshall's target is their beloved John McCain, not Clinton.

Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz, for instance, found Marshall's remark puzzling:

But isn't the McCain camp mockingly comparing Obama to the likes of Britney Spears, rather than implying that he likes to hang with starlets?

Again, Marshall should start make sense, since his comments will be scrutinized this time around. McCain is not a Clinton.

Among those who have seen the New Yorker Magazine's controversial cover depicting the Obamas as some sort of radicals/terrorists/muslims, 51% say it was ok, while 45% say it was not.

Among Democrats, a majority (65%) think it was not ok, compared to 64% of Republicans who thought it was not ok.

http://people-press.org/report/439/obama-new-yorker-cover

Writing for Time's Swampland blog, Ana Marie Cox observes that the scant available data from the new CMPA study on evening news bias in the networks' evening news shows, the most significant finding is the lack of bias existing present in them.

COX (7/28/08): The authors [of the study] admit that "most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative," and that, in fact, found "less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined." (I actually think that this apparent LACK of bias should be the real headline of the study.) Let's be generous and say that the average was about 1.5 "opinionated" statements a night—that's a grand total of about 60 "biased" statements since the study began on June 8.

Similarly, progressive media critic Bob Somerby today notes:

Simply put, CMPA’s studies are rarely worth the pixels they burn. (Neither are similar studies from other orgs.) The notion that CMPA can quantify “positive/negative” coverage usually turns out rather poorly. On what basis does CMPA decide that some statement is “positive” or “negative?” Often, organizations which offer such studies have arcane notions of what those terms mean. When they give examples, we sometimes learn that their idea of a “negative” comment doesn’t track our own real closely. And sometimes, these orgs give no examples at all. We are left with no real idea of what they’re talking about.

Somerby also points out that some people are equating "network evening news shows" with "the media", when in fact only evening news shows were examiined. Click on the links above for more on the issue.

This story broke Friday, but being that TPM is a liberal website, odds are that nobody wrote a thread or story here about these developments over the weekend; so allow me to be the first to do so:

A security guard employed by the Beverly Hills hotel which was allegedly a meeting spot for ex-Senator John Edwards and his alleged mistress, confirmed to Fox News that he intervened when the National Enquirer reporters tried to ask Edwards questions.

Edwards' face turned white as the ex-Senator asked the guard what the reporters had said to him.

The security guard did not mention Rielle Hunter, the alleged mistress.

Read more on the story:

Http:://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,391426,00.html