While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

"In the past 60 years, only one employee of the National Review, Weekly Standard or any conservative magazine has actually been hired as a reporter for a newspaper," says Brooks, who researched the question a few years ago.

Al-Ghad, June 9, 2008
Headline: "Obama, the American Candidate."

The American elections have provided an excuse for the Arab media to promulgate perverse, bigoted and age-old conspiracy theories that portray Israelis and Jews as controlling the candidates.

Novak, 77, has earned a reputation around the capital as an aggressive driver and has said that his secret desire is to be king of . . . er, a race-car driver.

Trying desperately to get home before sunrise, no doubt.

As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said a "black Corvette convertible with top closed plowed into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed onto the windshield."

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a "Walk" signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. "The car is speeding away. What's going through my mind is, you just can't hit a pedestrian and drive away," Bono said.

CQ Politics colleague Jonathan Allen just noted on MSNBC that Bono is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.

This visit, for Obama, is just a necessary evil -- part of an electoral campaign and not a sincere fact-finding mission. The fact that Obama made Afghanistan his first stop (after arriving in Kuwait, just next door to Iraq) suggests that it's his electoral campaign that sets his priorities when it comes to the war on terrorism, not the actual map and course of the war.

I already fired off an email to Time asking for corrections to that and several other glaring errors in that terrible piece. But as we've learned with Joe Klein, Time considers itself and its writers infallible, so there's slim chance of any corrections.

The original version of this story said that Hillary Clinton's appearance at a 2007 Netroots Q&A session was greeted by boos. The writer confused that event with accounts of another Clinton appearance that had taken place earlier. Clinton was not booed at the Netroots event.

With so many critical issues before us, including a flagging economy, rising food and energy prices, a housing crisis, almost 50 million citizens without health-care insurance, and the ever-present danger of terrorism, it's reasonable to think that the next President may continue in the tradition of having a Vice-President who plays a significant role in determining the direction of our country.

It's pretty obvious that the media has a bizarre fascination with Barack Obama. Some may even say it's a love affair.

"This straw poll was designed to help us understand a little more about who our netroots activists are and where they stand," said Toby Chaudhuri, communications director for the Campaign for America's Future. "There's a sea change happening in American politics and it's growing on the Internet. Progressives are gaining popularity, strength, capacity and political sophistication, far outpacing conservatives online."

McCain is in a better position to use this strategy against Obama than Clinton was. She was never wholly convincing in her adopted role as a working-class warrior. McCain, on the other hand, has the warrior part of the persona in his genes. Nor does McCain face the constraints Clinton did. Going negative in a primary makes party loyalists deeply nervous, and explicitly attacking cultural liberalism in a Democratic primary is unthinkable. Obama has more evident weaknesses than he did when the Democratic primaries started and he was freshly on the scene. His core audience, finally, is a smaller proportion of the general than of the Democratic-primary electorate.

The good news is that McCain is an inept campaigner and his campaign is also inept. The other good news is that the Media does not want to play along. ... It is because McCain is so weak a campaigner that Obama seems a shoo in to me. A better Republican candidate could have a chance. McCain is not that candidate.

UPDATE: I'll be on Sirius Satellite Radio at 5:30pm EST tonight on "Make it Plain with Mark Thompson," discussing Obama's overseas trip.