If anyone has the right to call themselves "fair and balanced" it's PBS. And the consensus opinion from their post-debate coverage was either a draw (from those who lean to the right) or a slight victory for Kerry (from those who lean more to the left). Even a draw looks good for Kerry when you consider that Bush likes to think of himself as a "war president."

The Daily Show seemed to believe that Kerry had scored victory as well. Jon had a decent interview with Wesley Clark and he lit into Rudy Giuliani during the interview with the former New York City mayor. They also had a segment where Bush was referred to as a "retard" who was "almost killed by a pretzel."

The right-wing bloggers seem to have started picking apart ever statement Kerry made in the debates looking for inconsistencies and misstatements. To them, I would argue that they should be very careful where they tread. Kerry and Bush were speaking without notes, and should be judged by the larger points they were trying to make and not by the minutia of their comments. And Bush backers should remember that Bush blatantly lied during a State of the Union speech that he read of a teleprompter. Thish strikes me as worse because it looks provably premeditated.

Also of interest on the topic of debate coverage is the NY Times's decision not to send their lead campaign reporter to Florida to watch the debate in person and then deal with campaign staff in the "spin room" where reporters are told that the candidates didn't really mean what they said. This is good news for those of you who want to get some decent post-debate coverage of what the candidates actually said in the debate.

The early consensus seems to have settled on this debate being more substance than style. We'll just have to see if that holds up in the face of the late-night spin and the eager-beaver fact checkers. Four years ago Gore was thought to have the early debates until it was discovered that he had made some misstatements during his debate remarks, so the spin that goes on tonight is very important.

Oh, and one more thing about PBS and their election coverage. Gwen Ifill is awesome. Here's an old interview of her from Salon that I like.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 30 September 2004 at 11:09 PM

Good God, Bush looks bad. It's not just the long pauses and frequent umms and wells. He routinely fails to fill his alloted time. These are important issues and he doesn't know enough to talk intelligently about them for two minutes or ninety seconds or sometimes even thirty seconds. And also, does anyone out there think Bush knows anything about Ayad Allawi beyond the fact that he is "brave and courageous?"

Kerry's best points? Osama. The more he says Osama's name, the better he looks. And his little digression about certainty was spot on. It both summarized George W. Bush to a T and explained why Kerry would make a much better president. All in 20 seconds.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 30 September 2004 at 9:30 PM

UPDATE: There have been reports of visitors who are unable to see some of the subdomains on this site -- for example, Mt. Athos or Rubidium -- but are able to see this page and some of the other subdomains. If you've had this problem, please leave a comment and let me know.

Some of you probably noticed the extended outage last week of all the -273 sites. This was because our provider's provider stopped paying its bills to the datacenter where this server was located. Consequently, the datacenter pulled the plug on the server we were running on and about 300 other servers and held our data hostage for a few days while it tried to extract money from the party who hadn't paid its bills. Eventually, -273's provider, webdiggity.com, was able to extract all of our data and move to a new provider. Off-site back-ups have also been arranged to prevent this situation from reoccurring. Previously, backups were on the secondary hard drive of our server and both this drives were backed up by the datacenter. However, they weren't releasing any backups until the bills were paid. Third-party backups are now SOP for webdiggity. The site should be fully functioning at this point, but I haven't verified everything. Please leave a comment here if something appears to be broken.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 9 September 2004 at 2:40 PM

The recent Cardinals series against the Padres and the Dodgers highlight the fact that using a closer in the traditional fashion might be good for the closer's arbitration numbers, but it doesn't always benefit their team. Both the Padres and the Dodgers have closers who are considered among the best in the game. But in the past five games by the time the ninth inning has rolled around, it's no longer possible to "save" the game, and the closers have stayed in the bullpen. Managers need to use their best relievers in the most difficult situations. This often means dealing with inherited runners and tough batters. Sometimes it means pitching when your team doesn't have the lead. It often isn't in the ninth inning.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 September 2004 at 11:38 AM