DEBATE FACT #5: RATING THE TWO CANDIDATES, JohnMcCain.com.

CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE: Barack Obama Has A Low Lifetime Rating Compared To John McCain's High Lifetime Rating

* Citizens Against Government Waste Gave Obama A Lifetime Rating Of 18 Percent. (Citizens Against Government Waste, "2007 Senate Ratings," councilfor.cagw.org, Accessed 10/4/08)

*Citizens Against Government Waste Gave McCain A Lifetime Rating Of 88 Percent. (Citizens Against Government Waste, "2007 Senate Ratings," councilfor.cagw.org, Accessed 10/4/08

Update: Tennessee man indicted for hacking Palin's e-mail account, InfoWorld.

David C. Kernell was indicted Tuesday on a single charge of accessing a protected computer by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville. The indictment, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, was unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated "Grassroots" Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them, The Jawa Report. 

Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine the source of smears directed toward Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Those smears included false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views.

FBI Searches Apartment of Tennessee Student Suspected of Palin Hack, Threat Level.

FBI agents executed a search warrant Sunday at the apartment of University of Tennessee student David Kernell in connection with the hack of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account.

According to a witness, several agents arrived at Kernell's Knoxville apartment in The Commons student housing complex shortly after midnight on Sunday morning while a party was in progress.

Go Ahead, Rain on My Parade, Reason.

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, an original pork-buster and friend of reason, has just launched Pork Parade. The spare-looking site is a hub for a number of social networks that let the congressman name and shame earmarks in real time, from his campaign cell phone (although he's been using his campaign computer until he upgrades his phone). 

The Lives of Others, Dean's World. 

I don’t care what they found. There is a line in the sand, on one side democracy, decency, freedom, on the other, fascism, indecency, slum, and terror. Gawker, and the media that remain enslaved by the myth of their legitimacy, have crossed the line. Whether Gawker broke the law, is not as important as whether they broke everything else.

Changes Afoot, Twitter Blog. 

We're getting ready to launch a refresh of parts of the Twitter.com interface. This release does not include any new features (well, one). It's mostly cosmetic changes. This post describes what we're doing and why.

On Saturday evening, two e-mails landed in my Gmail inbox, the first from the McCain campaign and the second from Obama’s team. Notice the order and the subject matter:

In case your eyes are as bad as mine (or you aren’t using Firefox
3.0’s nifty zoom feature) how about we blow up the relevant detail of
that image:

So John McCain’s staff sends out a tribute (complete with video) to
the too-soon late, great “Meet the Press” host and NBC Washington
bureau chief Tim Russert, and 45 minutes later, Barack Obama’s staff
sends out a commercial solicitation. Remembering the Titans vs. Buy
More Stuff.

I’m reminded of WashingtonPost.com’s botched e-mail alert the morning Sean Taylor died, and just a tiny bit that recent Sunday e-mail from Newsweek that somehow managed to omit
that edition’s only negative story about the Obama campaign. This one
is a bit more esoteric — how many outside the Beltway are on both
candidate’s e-mail lists?

Well, just about any reporter covering national politics. They
matter, right? And unlike WPNI’s newspaper and magazine, the Obama camp
at least has a rapid response team. I have no doubt this e-mail alert
was prepared and schedulde well in advance of Friday afternoon’s
terrible news. But because e-mail alerts can be timely, they must be timely. The Obama campaign must know this — after all, they beat all other presidential candidates with the first campaign e-mail of the New Year.

Would it have been so difficult to recycle a few of the candidate’s
comments from earlier in the day? They needn’t even go as far as the
McCain campaign did — the specially-recorded tribute video is a little
more personal than McCain’s tarmac remarks early Friday afternoon,
reflecting on the fact that he made 52 appearances on Russert’s “Meet”. And as Sean Hackbarth notes, this was clearly something McCain himself wanted to do.

Checking my inbox archives, I noticed this was the first time the Obama
campaign has flogged its online store in an e-mail subject line since
the last Christmas shopping season. But they have sent no e-mail
acknowledging (let alone mourning) Russert’s untimely passing, and I can’t even find a release on the website. I know the Obama campaign is sort of running against insider Washington, wasn’t Russert pretty much the best kind possible?

For anyone who bothered to open up those e-mails in succession, the juxtaposition looked something like this:

Especially when you consider that national political reporters who
worked alongside or in friendly competition with Russert are the most likely to
have noticed this discrepancy, the advantage here goes to McCain.

P.S. The McCain e-mail could use more color and
better design, but they should get credit for rendering the text in
actual ASCII/Unicode characters.

P.P.S. A personal favorite “Meet the Press” episode was the morning of May 27, 2007,
where Russert’s calm, methodical questioning laid bare Bill
Richardson’s surprising inability to defend himself on almost anything,
from the serious to the trivial. Russert managed to do gotcha without seeming
gotcha, and the hour-long interrogation was one of his most effective.
That was the real end of Gov. Richardson’s presidential campaign. The
transcript is here.

Adapted from an original post at Blog P.I.