It has been almost a month since I last reminded folks that to help you get your weekend started, you can access hours of streaming music — the good, the bad and the ugly — via the page I have set up for my other web gig, via the fantastic Hype Machine.  You can access tracks individually, or let them play through as a jukebox.  The new additions for this Friday are mostly

MSNBC’s First Thoughts: So was this week a turning point in the presidential race? The Obama campaign certainly believes it was, and that this will be the moment that Obama grabs the lead for good. If McCain never catches up at this point, his campaign’s actions this week (its blistering criticism of Obama and the media, the visuals it picked, its body language, its VP games) will get second-guessed for

In today’s New York Post, Kirsten Powers may overestimate how juggernauty Barack Obama’s campaign may be, but she is generally correct about the way in which the McCain contraption (credit Allahpundit) is still sputtering: “If he wants to run as Hillary 2.0, then McCain should rip off some of her better stuff.” Camp McCain does not lack for analysis of the campaign’s weaknesses.  Powers follows Time magazine’s Mark Halperin (h/t RTO

Although I avoided spoilers in last week’s review, I note that novelist Andrew Klavan has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal examining “What Bush and Batman Have in Common”: There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by

George W. Bush is yesterday, the Texas version of the arrogant world power. Obama is all about today: the “everybody really just wants to be brothers and save the world” utopia. As for us, we who sometimes admire and sometimes curse this somewhat anemic, pragmatic democracy, we will have to quickly get used to Barack Obama, the new leader of a lofty democracy that loves those big nice words —

TNR’s Gabriel Sherman suggests that the establishment media is “breaking up” with Barack Obama  — he treats them so bad! HotAir’s Allahpundit, focusing on a quote near the end from a reporter claiming, “They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” writes: After reading it, I can’t decide if the takeaway is (1) that the press is a bunch of whiny, self-entitled five-year-olds, per the comically overwrought reactions from Adam

The funniest report of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin comes from the NYT‘s Caucus blog: “Senator Barack Obama began his speech first by declaring that this was not a political speech.” Substantively, I welcomed his call for more support from Germany to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.  However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday she would make clear to Obama that there were limits to Germany’s military engagement in Afghanistan.  Merkel

Memorandum: To: The proggosphere, the Opinionated Press, New York Times, et al. Re: Attempting to claim John McCain is wrong about the counter-insurgency in Iraq At the risk of sounding rude, how dumb are you, anyway?  Starting an argument with John McCain over the timeline of the counter-insurgency in Iraq, e.g., the relationship between the Anbar tribes turning against al Qaeda and the “surge,” attempting to paint this as some

As almost always seems to happen after writing a post about taking pre-election polling with the requisite amount of salt, a poll arrives that raises a relatively undiscussed topic. In this case, some are interested in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that Barack Obama’s six point lead (unchanged from the same poll last month) expands to 13 points when third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added

Yesterday, I noted that the current polling trends were not showing any sign yet of a significant “bounce’” from Barack Obama’s world tour.  At almost the same time (accounting for time zones) TNR’s Jonathan Chait was noticing the same tightening of the race, under the title “Maybe Pundits Need to Spend More, Not Less, Time Following the Polls,“ juxtaposing the current trend with this lede: I see that John has already beaten me