McCain is doing something really smart right now. They're releasing attack ads, like this one:



Obviously this is a dirty smear that lies about Obama's position. If McCain ran that ad in wide rotation, there could be a serious backlash. But, like his other recent attack ads, McCain is barely running them anywhere.

These ads aren't designed to try and convince voters. These ads are designed to get media coverage, where the media reports what the ad says, thus putting their imprimatur on the message -- not to mention getting the message out for free. Ads are expensive, and the media can act as a force multiplier. McCain is making deliberately provocative ads in order to get that free coverage and messaging, and it's working well.

Obama needs to either convince the media not to cover them (good luck with that), or respond in kind. Or, maybe, get the media to take the angle that McCain is running distorting ads, but it's very hard to get the media to take explicit positions like that even if they are empirically true, and sadly, the Republicans have been much, much better in the last several elections of getting the media to run with their implicit message.

Anyone remember more than one story about how a democrat delayed flights by having their airplane sit on the tarmac for one reason or another? I recall Clinton and Gore both separately getting a ton of media attention over it when it happened to them.

But when Cheney does it, nary a peep from the "liberal" media.

The NYTimes published an article about Fox News' declining market share. Fox News' Fox and Friends got irked about it, and complained about the "hit piece" in the NYTimes.

During their segment, they altered the photos of the journalist and editor behind the story to make them uglier. Media Matters showed the actual images next to the edited images. Here they are.

Below is a screenshot of Fox & Friends featuring the photo it used of Steinberg, with the original photo on its left. Comparing the two photos, it appears that the following changes have been made: Steinberg's teeth have been yellowed, his nose and chin widened, and his ears made to protrude further.



Similarly, a comparison of the photo of Reddicliffe used by Fox News and the original photo suggests that Reddicliffe's teeth have been yellowed, dark circles have been added under his eyes, and his hairline has been moved back.

Now, my opinion of Fox News is not very high. But even I didn't think they'd stoop to the photoshop equivalent of drawing little mustaches on their perceived enemies. Is it a coincidence, as jgische pointed out to me, that they exaggerated the nose and ears of the guy with the Jewish name?

Oh, and they didn't even do it well. Check out the modified hairline on Reddicliffe, with the blurry top of his forehead, as if the top of his head just isn't in focus. C'mon, guys, I suck at photoshop and even I could do better than that.

I'm pretty skeptical of there being a widespread liberal media bias. I think that's largely drummed up by anecdotes and conservative talk-show hosts to sway listeners and influence media coverage -- and it's very successful, as evidenced by the rise of Fox News, which is far more to the right than any broadcaster is to the left.

But then I see articles like this one, Times Poll: Californians narrowly reject gay marriage, in the LA Times:

By bare majorities, Californians reject the state Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriages and back a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at the November ballot that would outlaw such unions, a Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.

But the survey also suggested that the state is moving closer to accepting nontraditional marriages, which could create openings for supporters of same-sex marriage as the campaign unfolds.

Here's the thing. According to the article, people who disapprove or strongly disapprove of the court's recent decision on gay marriage outnumber those or approve or strongly approve by 52-41. A proposed amendment to the state constitution was favored by registered voters 54-35.

In American elections, those kinds of numbers are landslides. They are not "narrowly rejecting" gay marriage. Just because the numbers are barely above 50% doesn't mean it's close, despite what the title and first paragraph would have you believe.

I find I'm therefore skeptical of this paragraph later in the column, even though I'd really like to believe it:

Either way, the poll suggests the outcome of the proposed amendment is far from certain. Overall, it was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters. But because ballot measures on controversial topics often lose support during the course of a campaign, strategists typically want to start out well above the 50% support level.

That's very heartening, but it was written by the same person who saw a landslide in a poll and described it as narrow. Is she right that 54-35 actually favors the lower side? I kind of doubt it, somehow, because of the apparent pro-gay-marriage bias to the article.

Obama made some remarks recently that caused some controversy:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

That last sentence has been used as an opening from Clinton and McCain and others to attack Obama for being "elitist". This has received tons of coverage, of both the remarks themselves and the ongoing battle over them. Every major news outlet has covered it extensively with multiple articles across several days.

At about the same time, Bush admitted that he approved of the torturing of al Qaeda suspects in CIA custody. And by "al Qaeda suspects", of course we mean, "people the administration claimed to be al Qaeda, many of whom later turned out not to be". If what the CIA did really does amount to torture legally (it included beatings and waterboarding at a minimum), then Bush just admitted to being part of a conspiracy to commit many felonies.

Yet how much coverage of this has their been? Not in the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, or the LA Times, or the wire services, or CNN, NBC, CBS, or Fox News that I could find. The Washington Post and ABC both had blog entries and back-page stories about it.

I'm boggled by the general lack of coverage of the whole torturing suspects thing, even before Bush admitted he knew about it and approved, but now it's getting ridiculous.

Winning. Obama won Iowa. Clinton won New Hampshire. Clinton won Nevada. Obama needs to win South Carolina to have a chance.

What are these primary elections doing? They are assigning delegates to the convention. Whoever has more delegates wins the primary. So, no problem, right? If you win the state, you win the state's delegates.

Actually no.

All of the democratic primaries are proportional. Obama got one more delegate than Clinton or Edwards from Iowa. Clinton and Obama both got 9 delegates from NH, and Obama actually got one more in NV.

Every primary so far has been a tie. Iowa was a three-way tie, the other two were just between the two leaders. Obama is leading by two delegates in a race to 2,115, with 4,136 still left unassigned. This race is a dead heat, with neither candidate leading in any kind of meaningful way.

But that is certainly not how the articles cover it. They trumpet that one or the other "won", and talk about "momentum", as if having an insignificant number more voters than the other person matters in any relevant way. Well, it does, if all the news coverage calls you a winner and the other person a loser. The whole thing is very distorted.

A tiny amount of the coverage has mentioned this issue specifically in regards to NV, portraying it as "Clinton wins, but Obama gets more candidates in something of a split victory". Except by the metric that matters, Obama did better, even if Clinton got a few more votes. A correct headline might read, "Obama wins NV, Clinton gets more votes." But you'll never see that, because even the tiny amount of additional complexity required to talk about delegates is apparently too much for the vast majority of the coverage out there.

The worst offender might be AOL, which has a lovely election coverage page which helpfully includes this table:

Closed Democratic Primaries

Date	State	Event	Winner	Delegates
01/19/08	Nev.	Caucus	Clinton 51%	12
01/15/08	Mich.	Primary	Clinton 54%	0
01/08/08	N.H.	Primary	Clinton 39%	9
01/03/08	Iowa	Caucus	Obama 38%	16

Wow, Clinton is crushing Obama! Three wins, way more delegates -- he's in trouble! Only, he actually has more than she does (38-36), not that you could tell from that table.

Note that none of this happens on the republican side because those are actually winner-take-all elections, so when McCain wins South Carolina, he really gets all the delegates and nobody else gets any. So it's much more accurate to talk about winners and losers there, as you would in a normal, winner-take-all election.

patrissimo wanted my last post to be about Harry Potter; here ya go.

Yahoo! just went to the movies, or at least everyone in the Santa Clara campus did. Capsule review of the fourth movie: big thumbs up.

It's definitely darker than previous movies, which is obvious from the book. We finally meet Voldemort in the flesh, and he is just as creepy as you could possibly want. The dragons were fun, many of the effects were lovely as expected, but the best parts of the movie might have been the teen relationship bits, surprisingly enough. Dragons are a lot less scary than asking girls to the big dance.

The major theme of the movie is probably change. Voldemort is back, with all that implies; the kids are growing up, turning into adolescents; and for the first time, Dumbledore doesn't seem to have all the answers. Childhood is over, and adulthood is scary. The somber end to the film suggested to me that Harry is in for more pain and uncertainty in the years to come.

Having read the books, of course, that's not really news. But the movie had the perfect tone to transition from the brightly colored, magical excitement of the early films to the darker, scarier world ahead.

mjlewis, Katy and I went to see Serenity last night. It was lots of fun, as expected, though we ended up sitting a little too close (not as close as patrissimo, resplendent in costume, who was two rows in front of us). It was also a little hard to hear some of the lines over the laughter, but that's part of the fun of an opening night crowd.

I am amazed that it was only playing on one screen. On opening night in silicon valley, they could have sold out more than one screen's worth of audience -- it seems crazy for them to throw that away. Serenity only has 2188 theaters this weekend, so its total won't be amazing -- but I bet its per screen totals with be fantastic.

The audience itself was lots of fun. I always stay to the end of the credits in whatever movie I go to; generally by the end, my group are the only people in the theater. This time, the theater stayed completely full all the way through, a fine showing of support.

And now, I'm off to Scotland for a few days. My mother is accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, and Katy and I are tagging along to lend moral support. Though it does require that I wear a suit for two days in a row, a feat I think I have not once accomplished in my 30 years.