Briefly noted via The Albany Project comes this bit of surprising news: the editors of Capitol Confidential have never heard of Rochester Turning, in my considered opinion one of the best blogs in the state of New York.

What Phil said:

That the writers of what is likely the most widely read political site in New York were completely unaware of one the state's best written and most effective blogs is completely astounding. It's even worse when you consider that RT front pager Jrviper is making the rest of the statewide media look silly by completely owning them on a potentially significant story. This is citizen journalism at its finest and it should shame those in the media who have so far been completely unaware of such a great site and the great work that they do.

Amen. But there's more.

The above two columns, via HuffPost, ran this morning in the New York Post, a newspaper seemingly devoid of copy editors.

One column snarls that Barack Obama is 'too left for New York' - as if - and the other titters excitedly the, um, case that he's a rock star who just might derail Hillary.

How goddamn fucking stupid are the people at the Post, anyway? Seriously? No wonder they're giving it away on Union Square.

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Today's must-read story (after E.J. Dionne's brilliant Op-Ed on New York) is a story in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal.

Just to note the obvious: the Journal is actually two newspapers, one real (the one that produces all the news) and one fake, the Op-Ed part. Notably, you have to pay for the former online, while the latter is free. And you do get what you pay for.

Dem Control Might Help Economy, WSJ.com Survey Finds

Democrats’ wins in November might boost the economy, economists in the latest WSJ.com survey found.

Most economists said the economy would perform best in the coming years if Democrats take control of at least one chamber of Congress. Only 12 of the 35 who answered the question said the economy would perform best under continued Republican control of the House and Senate. The best scenario, the economists said, would be Democratic control of the House only. The economists were almost evenly split over whether the stock market would perform better with a continued Republican lock on Congress or some measure of Democratic control.

Does anybody know what the hell happened? I knew they were behind the times (all pun intended) digitally, but this is ridiculous.

What the hell is wrong with Mort Zuckerman? What kind of a cheap cretin would let his #1 newspaper's website die such an untimely death?

(Image: Julienne Schaer for the Washington Post)

Oh well, here we go again. Just when we are all getting tired of talking about the racial issues involved in NY-11, they wind up on no less august a piece of real estate than the front page of the Washington Post. No wonder Councilman Yassky is firing staff.

David Yassky has a solid résumé, lots of campaign cash and plenty of ideas for improving the slice of Brooklyn he wants to represent in Congress. In another Democratic stronghold, he might be the runaway favorite.

But in New York's 11th District, Yassky's candidacy has touched off a controversy about race and turned a sleepy primary contest into an emotionally charged debate over minority political representation. The 11th District is one of the dozens of majority-black seats created in the aftermath of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. And Yassky, unlike his three primary opponents, is white.

Pity Michelle Malkin, or Maglalang, or whatever she calls herself these days. No, seriously.

The deranged immigrant-basher (and herself an immigrant of questionable legal status who should of right be on the first plane back to whatever Third World hell-hole she came from) is trying to organize protests against the New York Times, ostensibly for the treasonous act of publishing publicly available information, something that the régime Malkin supports has itself done.

Unfortunately for Malkin, even the wingnut-rich environs of Washington, a place where every other McMansion seems to house a right-wing organisation of some kind, with dozens of degreed drones, all drawing fat paychecks to shill the idea that Washington can't do anything right, didn't produce more than about a dozen or so "protesters".

Take heart, Michelle. You still have another chance, what with your New York City protest coming up next Monday. Hehe.

Hat Tip to Kos.

How do you know that Team Hillary is definitely planning a run for 2008? When James Carville starts writing Op-Eds that make the threadbare case that she can be elected.

Carville's case is essentially this: Hillary got elected in 2000 to the Senate despite objections from the naysayers; some of her polling numbers are not catastrophic; she has a net positive rating of 54%-42%; having been through the right-wing slime treatment for over a decade, nothing they can say, supposedly, will stick; and besides, those people who like her really, really like her.

Wake up, James (if I may call you that). It ain't so.

Hillary got elected in 2000 because of four factors: her willingness to work very hard for it, her own glamour as First Lady, her luck in having a weak opponent, and because New York is a blue state, at the time a blue state still angry over impeachment. For a sitting First Lady, especially this one, to get elected against a completely unknown junior Congressman in this state is not illustrative of anything. Whatever naysayers there were, not that I can really recall any, were at best marginal; after all, Rangel and Moynihan recruited her.

With regard to her polling numbers, show me one poll that shows a majority of the electorate willing to vote for her. Just one. No, polls from your own outfit, Democracy Corps, don't count. Then, I'll show you a whole series of polls that show a majority saying they wouldn't vote for her if her opponent was Satan incarnate.

Where the hell did I read that writers at the New York Times were being given bonuses for the amount of traffic their articles were bringing to the site?

I swear I read something like that related to Patrick Healy's panty sniffing article on the Clintons but can't find the source.

I'm doing research for a post and am going crazy trying to find the damn post. Help me find the source!

You'd think that someone running in a majority-black Voting Rights district would take some time to talk to the City's leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, no?

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. The AN reports, here:

Yassky, who has no trouble talking to the New York Times and the Daily News, but will speak only through a spokesman when dealing with the Amsterdam News, told the Times, according to the Gotham Gazette, “This is such an opportunity for the people of Brooklyn to say that we’re all in this together and to talk and vote as Brooklynites and not as members of one group or another.”

Kumbayah, dude. Is that the reasoning behind the "nurse in every Yeshiva" mailer? Or what?

Honestly, has anyone ever seen a pitch that paints the proposed election of a wealthy white candidate, funded by a flood of out-of-district special-interest money, in a Voting Rights district, as an example of "we're all in this together"?

And how seriously can one take the "we're all in this together" claims when that proposed togetherness does not include the time necessary for an interview with the leading black newspaper?