Does anyone else think …

… Todd “frickin'” Hoffman is the Honey Boo Boo of gold miners?

Associated Press facing real heat

It’s about ‘effin time. The “Anachronistic Press” has been so brain dead about everything internet it’s sad. Reminds me of the RIAA and MPAA’s futile and doomed efforts against this digital world.

From the BuzzMachine (first) link:

So now Tribune Company has given the AP notice – two years’ – to cancel, joining the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Bakersfield Californian, Idaho Falls Post Register of Idaho Falls, and Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World. These are more than shots across AP’s bow. They are shots at the AP, which has to reinvent itself. More on that later.

Media v. McCain

For about as long as he’s been a national figure, McCain has enjoyed a very cozy — you could even say deferential — relationship with the media. The warm feelings are over.

Very stupidly the McCain campaign (I’m guessing under the instructions of Steve Schmidt) is hiding his vice presidential pick away to an unprecedented level, routinely cancels press pool events and actually is calling out pool journalists by name and claiming the singled-out are “in the tank” for Obama.

The end result of this hostility from the McCain campaign will be a hard pushback by the media. Whenever Palin actually goes before an open mike and takes real questions and not canned softballs, she’ll be eviscerated. It’s clear she has little to no grasp on almost any policy issue, or even area for that matter, and a documented propensity to lie through a tough spot rather than face the facts.

Battling the press is a no-win situation when you are trying to gain elected office.

This report from Marc Ambinder may detail the moment when the media has decided the gloves are off.

From the (second) link:

But just a little more than an hour before Palin’s first meeting was set to begin, the pool producer was notified that he would not be allowed in to the photo spray. This means that the McCain/Palin campaign would get the benefit of free pictures of Palin’s meeting with world leaders without having to face the possibility that the candidate might have to answer a question from the media.
 
Television networks, including <B>CBS News</b> maintain a policy that if they are prevented from having an editorial presence at an event, they will not allow cameras to shoot.

Hence — no more network/national coverage of pool events Which might work for the McCain campaign because local TV coverage of Palin is usually much less skeptical.
A stand-off between the media and the McCain campaign.

The transgression? Apparently last week, CBS News’s Scott Conroy had the temerity to ask a question of Palin during an OTR session.

Who blinks first?  UPDATE: A CNN pool producer was allowed into a camera spray of Gov. Palin’s meeting with Hamid Karzai for all of 29 seconds. No other pencils, as they call them, were allowed in.

Now — in an effort to build some good will, the McCain campaign has scheduled a press conference this afternoon — his first since August 13.

Obama and the media

I can understand the McCain campaign’s frustration at the attention given to every move Obama makes. At the same time I seriously doubt McCain wants to crank up the scrutiny on his various missteps. All in all, both candidates are getting some seriously soft-glove treatment by the press.

McCain is in a tough spot. How do you compete with this?

Barack Obama strode onto the world stage on Tuesday with trademark audacity, or as his political enemies would have it, a dearth of humility, in the symbolic shadow of Jordan’s Temple of Hercules. As he tries to convince Americans he will keep them safe, the White House hopeful held his first major press conference abroad as presumptive Democratic nominee near ancient Roman ruins and a shrine to the mighty Greek mythic hero.

Overlooking sun-bleached homes and minarets of the Jordanian capital, Obama spoke about his stealth mission to Iraq, against a backdrop seemingly chosen to suggest a young dynamic potential president, at home and abroad.

It was another example of the Obama campaign’s flair for political imagery, and a world away from frigid icebound Iowa, or hard-knocks schools in rustbelt towns in Ohio where presidential candidates usually hang out.

After knocking the dust of Iraq off his boots, Obama swapped his khakis and flak jacket for a suit and red tie.

Even worse, he was thrown under the bus by Jonah Goldberg, GOP party hack:

Within months of the invasion, McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Later, when the Iraqi civil war erupted, Al Qaeda in Iraq metastasized and the Iranians mounted a clandestine surge all their own, McCain doubled-down; he argued that we couldn’t afford to lose and proposed a revised counterinsurgency strategy for victory. That was the same very month that Obama introduced the “Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007.”

That’s all great stuff for McCain’s biographers. But the tragic Catch-22 for the Arizona senator is that the more the surge succeeds, the more politically advantageous it is for Obama.

Voters don’t care about the surge; they care about the war. Americans want it to be over — and in a way they can be proud of.

When this is the best you get from the bought and paid for set, there is no base. The problems facing McCain include the Christianists don’t like him, fiscal conservatives don’t trust him and Reagan Republicans understand that he’s not one of them. There’s not much left of that stool once you subtract all that core support.