TO SUBSCRIBERS:   All subscribers and donators, through November 1st, have been sent security e-mails asking you to reply so your name can be added to our mailing list.  YOU MUST REPLY TO THE E-MAIL TO RECEIVE YOUR FREE SUBSCRIBER SERVICES.  If you inadvertently deleted it, or misplaced it in your computer, or didn't receive it, please notify us at service@urgent agenda.com, and another will be sent.

It is imperative, especially if we go into political opposition, to have a strong subscriber base.  Otherwise, we cannot maintain the service in the way that you wish it.  So please subscribe today in the right-hand column. We want Urgent Agenda to be your online home as we fight for our principles. Please read the following notice and do subscribe. 

TO OUR READERS

We are near the end of our second subscription drive.  Subscriptions are critical to the survival of Urgent Agenda.  If you like what you see, please subscribe in the column on the right. 

Consider:  A week of Urgent Agenda costs less than a candy bar.  That's right - a week for less than a Milky Way.  We think that's an awfully good deal.

Our main page will always be free.  Subscribers support it because they want to guarantee that it exists at all.  But now, new and current subscribers and donators will receive special benefits.  We will be offering what amounts to an extra day of Urgent Agenda, additional audio reports, and a special e-mail address for subscribers to write to us and make their feelings known.  The "extra day" will include subjects we don't cover on the main site.  Subscriber services will be launched soon after the election.

If for any reason you wish to cancel your subscription, the unused portion will be returned to you, upon request. 

On election day, if current conditions continue, we will go into opposition.  A voice like Urgent Agenda is needed now, more than ever. 

We must be a subscription-based service.  Please become a subscriber, and join a very special, self-selected group.

---------------------------------------------------

SNIPPETS, our daily collection of short items and comments, is here.

--------------------------------------------- 

Answers to last week's "Current Question" are here. The new "Current Question" is here, in the right-hand column.

----------------------------------------------------

TO LISTEN TO OUR AUDIO COMMENTARIES, GO HERE.  NEW AUDIO CLIPS ARE POSTED PERIODICALLY.

Here is my audio commentary:  "Will there be a second Cuban Missile Crisis?"

We are working on podcasts. 

----------------------------------------------------------

IBD/TIPP:  OBAMA UP ONLY TWO, 47-45!

SUNDAY,  NOVEMBER 2,  2008

HOLLYWOOD IN CRISIS

Posted at 7:03 p.m. ET

There is a looming crisis in Hollywood, with potentially devastating psychological effects. We've written a bit about it before here, and I wanted to bring you up to date.

The crisis involves The One, and the outside chance that he could lose.  Hollywood fears the trauma that would accompany that result.  Psychiatrists are apparently running 24-hour walk-in offices out of the top floors of Beverly Hills mansions.

As usual, it's an English-speaking foreign journalist, this time writing for Australia's Sidney Morning Herald, who nails the story.  Be prepared for sadness:

A HIDEOUS new affliction is creeping through the ranks of America's creative community.

The further Barack Obama edges ahead of John McCain in the million and one polls that are coming out the more pernicious the nagging fear becomes.

What if he loses?

Barely a left-wing pundit, barely an Oscar-nominated softie can sleep a wink these days for fear of the race riots and international humiliation that will ensue should "The One" be defeated on Tuesday.

No intimidation there. Of course not.  No American would actually vote based on a fear of race riots and international humiliation.  No, never.  Hmm.

The comedian Chris Rock is at least capable of joking about it. "If Obama loses?" he replied to a question from talk show host Bill Maher. "Well, that Wednesday after election day, anybody … any activity in your life that involves black people, it's not going to get done. If you're at the airport? No one's going to get your bags."

Yeah, hilarious.  Vote our way, or else.

Crack teams of chiropractors are at the ready, and Nissen huts full of qualified shrinks and aromatherapists line Rodeo Drive to soothe the tortured brigades of the psychologically wounded should "The One" be robbed of victory.

Actress Susan Sarandon has already issued a veiled threat to the public.

"It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people," she told Britain's Telegraph newspaper with a touch of implied menace in June this year. "If they prove me wrong, I'll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don't know. We're at an abyss …"

Go already.  Please.  But Canada should be forewarned about a migration north of the emotionally unstable.

Barbra Streisand vowed to emigrate to Canada in 2000 if George Bush were ever elected President, an undertaking she refreshed four years later at the prospect of his re-election.

But she was still sufficiently resident in California on September 16 this year to host a $US2500 ($3800) a head fund-raiser for Obama at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Actually, she had trouble scheduling a moving van.  That's all it was.

The actor Alec Baldwin and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder made similar threats in 2000, as did Robert Redford in 2004, but none has since enriched the Canadian cultural scene.

In fact, Canadian immigration records show that arrivals from the United States actually slowed in the six months after George Bush's re-election in 2004.

That's because most Americans are sane and loyal, and live in the real world.  I've worked in Hollywood.  Real it ain't.

November 2, 2008.      Permalink          

BULLETIN AT 4:06 P.M. ET:  The IBD/TIPP tracker, the most accurate in 2004, has Obama up only two points, 47-45, as reader Fred Hill points out.  For their analysis, go here.  Clearly, this is at variance with all other polls, as listed at Real Clear Politics.  But there is that track record to consider.  Let us hope. 

UPDATE AT 3:52 P.M. ET:   Gallup, using its traditional model, has Obama up eight, 51-43; using its "expanded" model, Obama is up nine, 52-43.  Both were at ten yesterday.  CNN/Opinion Research, just out, has Obama with a seven-point lead, 53-46. 

UPDATE AT 10:57 A.M. ET:  The Hotline poll, just out, has Obama up five, 50-45.  The three trackers published so far today all have Obama up five or six points, and all have him at 50 or 51 percent. 

COMMENT:  Look, you never know.  Obama overpolled by an average of seven points in the primaries.  The race could be tighter than the polls show...or a great ground game by Obama on Tuesday can widen his lead.  Three days from today we'll know the whole story. 

FROM THE DEPTHS OF HIS SOWELL

Posted at 10:25 a.m. ET

Thomas Sowell has been one of the most vigorous Obama doubters during this campaign, and now he tops off his effort with a final blast, predicting no great things from The One.  This will not make Obama's day:

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Well, Thomas Sowell just got scratched off Michelle's Christmas-card list. 

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

No White House invitations either, even for the Easter-egg hunt.

"This is our time!" he proclaimed. And "I will change the world." But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.

Oh come on, he can bring in Oprah to work on those things. 

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America's future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

Oh, Sowell, so real world!  Don't you realize we don't talk about "enemy nations" in the Age of Obama?  They're "societies with alternative visions."  Get with the program.

Senator Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, has for years shown the same easy-way-out mindset. Senator Biden has for decades opposed strengthening our military forces. In 1991, Biden urged relying on sanctions to get Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait, instead of military force, despite the demonstrated futility of sanctions as a means of undoing an invasion.

People who think Governor Sarah Palin didn't handle some "gotcha" questions well in a couple of interviews show no interest in how she compares to the Democrats' Vice Presidential candidate, Senator Biden.

Joe Biden is much more of the kind of politician the mainstream media like. Not only is he a liberal's liberal, he answers questions far more glibly than Governor Palin--grossly inaccurately in many cases, but glibly.

Yeah.  One heartbeat away.  It's an argument for hoping Obama stays in good health.      Permalink          

Finally...

Add to Obama and Biden House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and you have all the ingredients for a historic meltdown.

And The New York Times will blame Bush.

November 2, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 9:34 A.M. ET:  Rasmussen reports Obama up five, 51-46.  Obama is showing solid leads in all the polls, but his numbers, hovering around 50 percent, could still potentially spell trouble if there's a last-minute surge of support from undecideds toward McCain.  We haven't seen that surge yet.

WHY THE PRESS BIAS?

Posted at 8:57 a.m. ET

The obvious Obama-boosting by the press has now become one of the most talked-about subjects of the campaign.  That talk is likely to continue as the very journalists who helped put Obama in power start covering his administration, assuming he's elected. 

But why the press bias?  A distinguished observer has sent us an e-mail outlining some possibilities:

-- The media follows the polls and rewards the winner in its daily coverage.  That comports with the CMPA study that found Obama getting negative coverage in the summer and positive coverage in the fall.

-- The candidate makes fewer mistakes, resulting in better coverage.  That is consistent with findings that Obama got better coverage in the fall than the other three major party ticket candidates, whose campaigns and personal behavior produced more mistakes.

-- The media is more leery of criticisms that might reflect racial stereotypes than those that might reflect gender and age stereotypes.  This is consistent with the consistently negative coverage of the female candidates Clinton and Palin, and of some of the negative coverage of McCain over the course of the year.

-- The media wants to cover the first African-American president and are "voting the story" in their coverage.  An occupational incentive could be propelling this.

-- The media has a liberal bias and so have subjected Palin and McCain to negative coverage this fall.  This bias is emphasized because of Obama's liberalism and African-American identity.

I personally think most, if not all, of these factors are at work.  Some are entirely understandable and explicable and others are disturbing.

These are solid reasons, and their overall effect is to erode the credibility of the media.  We've seen the rapid financial deterioration of some news organizations recently.  The Christian Science Monitor is ending its daily print edition.  New York Times bonds have been reduced to junk status.  The Los Angeles Times is in serious jeopardy.  Some in print journalism attribute these ailments to competition from the internet and cable news.  I would suggest another reason:  The press has surrendered its greatest asset - its ability to gather news and present it objectively in ways no alternative medium can.  Instead, it has moved toward opinion journalism, journalism intended to "make a difference."  The audience is rejecting the change.  Many people feel they no longer need newspapers if those papers are simply going to be extended editorials. 

The future of the press is in the press's hands.  It always has been.  Those hands, today, seem less than capable.

November 2, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 7:55 A.M. ET:  Zogby has Obama up six this morning, 50-44.  There was much talk and drum-beating yesterday over comments by Zogby hinting at a McCain surge.  Apparently, there never was any such surge.  Zogby is a master of hype and self-promotion, and we got both yesterday.

COMMENT:  Please notice that Obama is only at 50 percent.  If that erodes a few points by Tuesday, the race could become competitive. 

SATURDAY,  NOVEMBER 1,  2008

THUMBS DOWN FROM DOWN UNDER

Posted at 10:26 p.m. ET

We've said here before that some of the most astute comments about American politics come from the English-speaking foreign press.  Today Greg Sheridan of The Australian, expresses his view about our campaign.  Don't expect raves.  Those you can get at CNN.

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I've ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

The politics of the world's greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.

Sheridan was never a candidate for the Australian diplomatic corps.

This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics. There were presentiments of this in John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was the critical transitional figure who morphed from a traditional politician into a pure soap opera celebrity, with all the baroque plot twists and personal dysfunction.

Ah yes, we remember him well.  Didn't his wife just lose?

Barack Obama is the first pure celebrity presidential candidate. He is a superior celebrity, superbly in control of himself, masterful at presentation, effortlessly detached, as the best celebrities are, from the controversies that swirl around him.

Consider the arc of Obama's presidential rise. He was introduced by Oprah Winfrey on her non-political talk show. She is a clever woman, Winfrey, and she, before almost anyone else, saw Obama's crossover potential as a figure in her world - confessional celebrity psycho-babble - and the world of electoral politics.

Great way to select a president.  Maybe the next one will be runner-up on Donald Trump's next full-employment series.

It is typical to see Obama's life described as an incredible odyssey that could only happen in America. There was nothing incredible about it. His mother was a peripatetic academic researcher. He was reared mostly by his grandparents. His grandmother was a bank vice-president and his grandfather a furniture store manager and then insurance salesman. They gave him a sturdily middle-class life.

He went to Hawaii's best high school and America's efficient meritocracy later saw him attend Columbia and Harvard universities. This is all entirely admirable, but there is nothing the least incredible or odyssey like about it.

But Mr. Sheridan, think of the movie, the opera, the TV series.  How can you say the things you do? 

As celebrity material, McCain's memoir is slightly less user friendly than Obama's. This is because being a prisoner of war is not something most Americans can imagine themselves doing, whereas growing up in Hawaii and resenting your grandpa a bit and going off to New York and feeling the terrible but causeless burden of self, and then going to Chicago to live, these are things the average American can relate to.

But what a dismal and pathetic basis duelling memoirs are on which to vote.

Well, maybe the media could give us something else.  But celebrity is so much easier, and far more fun.  And the TV reports are great.

Although Palin embodied many of the dynamics of celebrity, because her life and beliefs so comprehensively repudiate the liberal consensus around which most media celebrities cluster she aroused a visceral hatred in the elite media. One of the ways in which celebrity has been so destructive of serious political debate in this campaign is that Obama and McCain have had plastic political identities, while their celebrity identities have been zealously safeguarded. This is the opposite of mature politics.

Correct.  Immaturity, a prolonged adolescence, has become an American political disease.

History tells us that either McCain or Obama could possibly make a good president. But this campaign, uniquely, has given us no basis for knowing whether this is likely. Electorates have always been concerned about character in political leaders, but the traditional proofs of character - steady commitment, solid achievement - have given way to the fraudulent tinsel of celebrity.

This is American politics as American Idol. And that's a giant step backwards.

Americans will understand that when Obama faces his first crisis.

November 1, 2008.      Permalink          

NOTE AT 7:31 P.M.   This is from an Associated Press tory, published today:

An Obama loss — or McCain comeback — would be a crushing disappointment for Democrats in a year tailor-made for the party. It would suggest McCain's experience trumped Obama's clarion call for change, and raise troubling questions about white Americans' willingness to vote for a black man.
Blacks, in particular, might be furious and deeply suspicious of an almost sure thing that slipped away.

We wrote here last night about intimidation in this campaign.  Intimidation doesn't have to be direct.  It can be implied.  It may not come from the source of the threat.  It may come from a sympathizer.  Read the last paragraph of that quote again.  Note the word "furious."  What does it imply?  When Americans go into the voting booth on Tuesday, how many will think, "Maybe I'd better vote for Obama. Avoid trouble."  That is the fruit of intimidation.  It's been an undercurrent throughout the campaign, and it is tragic.

UPDATE AT 3:47 P.M. ET:  The IBD/TIPP tracker, just out, has Obama up five, a gain of one since yesterday.  There is absolutely no evidence in the five trackers we've published today of any surge toward McCain, except in the Zogby poll.  It can still happen, but there are only two full days of campaigning left. 

UPDATE AT 2:13 P.M. ET:  Several new trackers are now out.  Unfortunately, they do not confirm Zogby's finding of a late surge toward McCain.  Hotline has Obama up seven, 51-44.  And Gallup, in a disturbing report, has Obama up ten using either its traditional or expanded model.  Both show a 52-42 race.  The lead was eight and nine points yesterday.  With the exception of Zogby, all trackers reporting today have Obama above 50 percent. 

COMMENT:  Gallup swings more than the other polls, and I have my doubts about this result.  Also, it's hard to believe that the traditional and expanded models are showing the same thing...unless you crank in the margin of error.  Gallup's published margin of error for the traditional sample is three points, for the expanded it is two points. 

However, the cold reality is that, in the four trackers published today, only Zogby shows a gain for McCain.  We await the IBD/TIPP result, to be published later today. 

UPDATE AT 9:57 A.M. ET:    Rasmussen is now out, and has Obama up five, 51-46.  Unlike Zogby, Rasmussen detects no late surge of support for McCain, and describes the race as "remarkably stable."  Three more trackers will report later today. 

OUR EYES AND EARS.  SURE.

Posted at 8:47 a.m. ET

Ed Lasky at American Thinker alerts us to an excellent piece by Victor Davis Hanson on one of the biggest scandals of this political year - the reckless bias of the news media, a bias that will further erode the confidence of the American people in its self-appointed "eyes and ears."  But what do you do when the eyes refuse to see and the ears refuse to hear?

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnable.

Sadly, everyone didn't know.  Only informed, probing people knew.  And today, students learning the history of that war aren't taught the truth, only the approved "narrative."

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people.

That is correct, without qualification.  Consider financing of elections.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.

Reaction?  More like hysteria.  There are essentially no media questions about the vast sums Obama has raised, how he has raised them, and from what sources.

What about the vice presidential choices?

We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.

And Biden?

By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad.

But Joe has the most important qualifications of all - he works in Washington and knows reporters.

The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.

So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.

Obama's past:

In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.

Wait.  Can we ask about his past?  Isn't that McCarthyism, or pastism, or one of those isms they teach at Harvard?

Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.

Oh, but he's an intellectual, always thinking, always evolving.  Or is it just that he's always running.

Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.

These conservative historians like Hanson - always dredging up embarrassments.  Aren't we supposed to look forward to change we can believe in?  Aren't we the ones we've been waiting for?  Hmm.  Maybe not.

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

But who will be there to tell us to regret it.  Chris Matthews?   The publisher of The New York Times?  Katie Couric?  Jon Stewart?  Al Franken?

And those are the intellectuals.

The alternative media is here, and we're ready.

November 1, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 7:33 A.M. ET:  Zogby has Obama up five, 49-44, a decline of two since yesterday.  Zogby notes that McCain had an especially strong day yesterday.

COMMENT:  One poll, one opinion.  Four other trackers will report later today.  Be cautious.