October 10, 2008 3:01 PM
Obamanation: super ads, subterfuge, and suspicious friends
Barack Obama to pay big for primetime buy Half-hour ads will run on Oct. 29
By Paul J. Gough
Oct 10, 2008, 12:30 PM ETNEW YORK -- Barack Obama will pay NBC and CBS almost $1 million each for the campaign's half-hour ad buy in primetime Wednesday, Oct. 29, less than a week before the election.
According to papers available at CBS's headquarters in New York, the campaign agreed Monday to pay $961,000 for the entire 8-8:30 pm time period. It wasn't clear whether that was in pattern, meaning it would run across all time zones at that period.
NBC will sell Obama the half-hour time buy for $891,250 gross and $775,000 net, according to documents from NBC available at its 30 Rock headquarters.
The agreed-upon prices are not what it would cost an average advertiser for a half-hour time buy, which are extremely rare in broadcast network primetime anyway. They are the so-called "lowest unit cost" that is required under federal law.
Read rest here.
Alarming report in The Washington Times - not in the Mainstream Media, natch:
Obama tried to sway Iraqis on Bush deal
In private conversations on troop presence, candidate pitched delay
Barbara Slavin
Friday, October 10, 2008At the same time the Bush administration was negotiating a still elusive agreement to keep the U.S. military in Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to convince Iraqi leaders in private conversations that the president shouldn't be allowed to enact the deal without congressional approval.
Mr. Obama's conversations with the Iraqi leaders, confirmed to The Washington Times by his campaign aides, began just two weeks after he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in June and stirred controversy over the appropriateness of a White House candidate's contacts with foreign governments while the sitting president is conducting a war.
Read rest here.
From today's Washington Post Editorial page:
Obama & Friends: Judge Not?
by Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 10, 2008Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.
But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.
McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.
Read rest here.
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Comments
Nice compilation, Barbara.
Posted by: Jillian | October 10, 2008 4:48 PM
