ST. PAUL, Minn. — Change is coming, change you can count on.

That is the simple, central message from the two presidential nominating conventions held in Denver and St. Paul during the past two weeks.

Whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain going to the White House in January, the new president will understand that his mandate from the voters is to cleanse Washington of its excessive partisanship and attempt to break the gridlock that has prevailed on almost all the big issues.

The good news is that Obama and McCain, for different reasons, have about as good a prospect of achieving that change as any two politicians you could find.

The acceptance speeches they delivered will not find places in many collections of great campaign oratory. But rhetoric aside, the clear intent of both candidates was to signal that they understand the frustration of voters of all parties with the poisonous status quo of recent years in Washington.

MSNBC is removing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as the anchors of live political events, bowing to growing criticism that they are too opinionated to be seen as neutral in the heat of the presidential campaign.

CNN hires-on with McCain campaign… officially adopts McCain “hockey moms” terminology … and echoes their “Wal*Mart moms” usage.

Video of CNN’s John King, while discussing target McCain voter demographics with Wolf Blitzer & sidekick (Gloria?)… “Another big constituency … are what they’re (McCain campaign) now calling ‘hockey moms.’ We used to call them ‘the soccer moms’; we’re calling them ‘hockey moms’ in this campaign because of Sarah Palin.” So CNN is adopting the McCain camp terminology for the previously-labeled “soccer mom” demographic, and is jumping on-board with the new McCain camp “Wal*Mart mom” term. (To King’s minimal credit, he at least qualified his use of “Wal*Mart moms” as McCain campaign terminology, and didn’t, within this segment, internalize it into the official CNN lexicon.)

Given much of the political battle is about creating bonds between voters and a candidate, it comes across to me as the height of unprofessionalism for CNN to adopt McCain campaign terminology in their coverage, effectively doing mass media canvassing for McCain.

Good to see our media standing strong and holding fast to their objectivity.

NEW YORK In an unusually heated attack on a veteran political reporter by a cable news host, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann laced into the Associated Press’s Charles Babington an hour after Barack Obama had concluded his speech in Denver on Thursday night.

Nearly all of the top commentators and reporters on the three cable news networks had hailed Obama’s speech as something new and powerful, and filled with specifics, and predicted it would have a positive effect on his chances vs. John McCain. This hallelujah chorus included conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan and the longtime Republican David Gergen, as well as Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams. Buchanan called it the best and most important political convention speech he had ever heard, going back 48 years.

So the liberal Olbermann was outraged that the AP’s Babington had written, in his analysis of the speech, just off the wire, that Obama had tried nothing new and that his speech was lacking in specifics. He read the first few paragraphs on the air, lamented that it would be printed in hundred of newspapers on Friday, and concluded, “It is analysis that strikes me as having borne no resemblance to the speech you and I just watched. None whatsoever. And for it to be distributed by the lone national news organization in terms of wire copy to newspapers around the country and web sites is a remarkable failure of that news organization.

Obama’s striptease may be risky

Fred Barbash
Fri Aug 22, 7:08 PM ET

In dragging out the announcement of his vice presidential nominee to almost the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has at once demonstrated his willingness to defy conventional political expectations — and to hold the news media in his thrall while doing it.
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David Gregory speculates that the Edwards’ affair may be bad news for Obama. I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards’ affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton’s public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards’ revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they’ve applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.

“Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome?” Gregory also said that, “now, questions about his [Edwards'] future abound in the party and whether this creates another shadow over Barack Obama as he gets ready for the conventions.”

McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief has won the Nieman Foundation’s first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence for pre-Iraq war coverage.

The foundation said John Walcott’s reporting team stood out for its skeptical coverage of the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq invasion. Nieman Curator Bob Giles called Walcott a “dogged” editor who challenged justifications for the war that later proved false.

Walcott was working as Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau chief during the run-up to the war. Knight Ridder has since been bought by McClatchy.

The medal is given by the Harvard-based foundation to a journalist whose work it says shows independence and integrity. It will be presented at the Newseum in Washington D.C. in October.

ABC News reported a few days ago that a group of so-called Principals — including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — met dozens of times in the White House to “discuss and approve” specific interrogation techniques to be used against suspected terrorists.

Initial reports indicated that Bush was “insulated” from the “series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.” Bush eventually dispelled the notion that he was out of the loop, though, and said — arguably, bragged — that he endorsed the Principals’ work from the outset. The president told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz, “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

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The John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is not the first article the New York Times has held back for political reasons. They have now done this on at least three occasions:

1. The original FISA story on how the Bush administration was not getting warrants for wiretaps inside the United States.
2. The original story in 2004 that showed Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
3. The McCain-Iseman story.

We had James Risen, the writer of the first two stories on our show back in 2005 and he admitted that they held the Bin Laden story until after the 2004 election because the New York Times didn’t want to “get caught up in the politics of it.”

Another way of stating that is that they were afraid of being called the liberal media by Republicans. After decades of being chastised for being liberal, they have become gun’shy. In this McCain story, they also held off until they were about to outed by other news agencies as sitting on the story.