(continued)

Hit: Ryan Lizza's interesting take in the New Yorker on Barack Obama' s relaunch, but the piece is already a little dated because it was written before the Las Vegas debate.

Hit: As usual, Frank Rich tells you details of Bernard Kerik's indictment that you won't learn anywhere else—and he wonders if Judith Regan will supply the silver bullet that could destroy Rudy Giuliani's campaign.

Hit: Media Matters has come under attack for being a Hillary mouthpiece, but nevertheless performs a useful service here by debunking the idiotic Hillary restaurant-tip-gate story.

Hit: Two excellent pieces in Slate here and here about America's outrageous neglect of Iraqi refugees.

Hit: Is this the biggest book story ever, or another electronic bust? Newsweek puts the Kindle—a scary $399 e-book reader from Amazon with which you can instantly change the font to accommodate middle-age eyes, receive e-mail, and subscribe to the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Le Monde—on the cover. FCP hates the idea of electronic books, but with all those possible subscriptions, it could become the news junkie's new permanent appendage. Worst newsmagazine sentence in the cover story: "The battery has to last for a while [30 hours] since there's nothing sadder than a book you can't read because of electile dysfunction." Andy Rosenthal anticipated this toy in an interview with FCP two weeks ago. Did he know something we didn't know?

Hit: The LAPD abandoned an outrageous plan to map all the Muslims in the neighborhood after the Los Angeles Times exposed it.

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ON THE RECORD

NO COMMENT Clinton

Michael Crowley wrote in the New Republic that Hillary Clinton's campaign has gone to unprecedented lengths to intimidate reporters and control their coverage. The biggest surprise: So far the strategy seems to be working. "'It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them,' says a veteran Democratic media operative." While Crowley was forced to rely heavily on anonymous reporters ("'They're too smart,' one furtively confides. 'They'll figure out who I am'"), Full Court Press got the chief political correspondents of the New York Times and the Washington Post to discuss the matter on the record—perhaps because neither of them joined in their colleagues' criticisms of team Clinton. Adam Nagourney of the Times and Dan Balz of the Post both thought Crowley's story was completely plausible—but they also said that they didn't find anything exceptional about the Clinton campaign's strong-arm methods:

Adam Nagourney: I might get treated differently because of who I am and where I work. Are they more impenetrable than the Bush campaign or the Bush White House? No. And I don't feel mistreated by them. I find other campaigns are as apt to call aggressively and complain as the Clinton campaign. A bunch of them make a real effort to keep track of what reporters are doing and to some extent to control the reporting. I think the Clinton people are doing it more effectively than any other campaign. But not in a way that crosses the line. For me, crossing the line is lying or misleading, and the Clinton people have never done that to me. I think they have much studied the Bush campaign of 2004, which in many ways was like this.

Dan Balz: I would come down where Adam is and probably for many of the same reasons. They're obviously tough and they play hard, but I think all of the campaigns do. And I think they look for opportunities to push back at reporters and opponents. As Adam said, because there are a number of people in the campaign that I've dealt with for a long time, I think that the nature of those relationships is somewhat different. If they've got a disagreement, I hear about it. But you learn over the years the difference between a serious complaint and one that is just obligatory. They don't give away things. They're basically always on the message of the day. But I can't criticize them for that. They don't just want to win every news cycle, but every minute of every news cycle. It was always hard to knock the Bush people off the message of the day. And the same is true of Clinton.