A Fistful of Euros:” While most observers still expect a compromise between incoming Commission president Barroso and those groups in the [European parliament] which threatened to block his entire team over the Buttiglione row the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reports that Rocco Buttiglione may ‘resign’ today and be ‘replaced by Italys highly regarded foreign minister Franco Frattini’.
That would be good for Europe and good for democracy. It would be nice to see the wild-eyed right wing being rolled back somewhere.
Chalk another one up for the weblogs 
Chris Bowers has a devastating analysis of why he finds political weblogs so much more useful than television news channels in covering the election (via Matt Gross):
| How can a station operating on a ten digit budget possibly be so much worse at analyzing polls than hundreds of websites from all ideologies operating either for free or with a few thousand dollars? The answer isn’t just bias because, as I noted, there are many right-wing sites that would never have made such a pathetic gaffe as CNN did today. The answer has everything to do with how cable networks cover the election, and where they direct their energies. |
| Instead of offering a wide survey of all polls, they tend to only show the polls they have commissioned. Instead of going over internals, they intentionally show the most dramatic top-sheet results. Instead of reporting on new voter registration numbers, they show campaign ads. Instead of regularly talking to election analysts such as Charlie Cook, they have a bobble-head anchor talk to one spokesperson from each campaign, as though that is going to offer us insight to anything except new talking points. Instead of fact-checking, they show sound bite excerpts from stump speeches. Instead of providing nuance, they cram everything into their overarching, simplistic narrative. Instead of covering issues, they report on personalities. In other words, in almost every possible circumstance, they favor entertainment about the election over news and analysis of the election. |