Who hasn't noticed the media has gradually filled up with the childen of journalists/TV and/or writerly personalities:

Chris Wallace

Matt Taibbi

Luke Russert

Christopher Buckley

Bill Kristol

Tucker Carlson

The children/relatives/spouses of politicians:

Ron Reagan

Michael Reagan

The late Maureen Reagan

Campbell Brown

Billy Bush

Andrea Mitchell

Steven Ford

Mika Brzezinski

Dan Abrams (his father was politically very well-connected)

John Ellis

Greg Kelly

Pinch Sulzberger, son of Punch, runs the NY Times.

Lachlan Murdoch will take over daddy Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which Rupert inherited from his daddy Keith Murdoch.

And on it goes.

As media consolidates and fewer outlets exist, the fewer voices we will hear genuinely question authority for the sake of learning the truth (as opposed to questioning authority in order to topple it in favor of the authority preferred by the media owner). We lucked out after WWII. Our culture was wealthy enough to support a number of newspapers and magazines and the public really owned the airwaves. That media diversity is gone now, along with postwar prosperity.

There are plenty more incestuous relationships in the "news" media. I can't keep track of them all. I wish someone would compile a list.

Maybe we could compile a list?

Certainly the persons involved in the media themselves will not recuse themselves from covering stories in which their family members are involved. God forbid Andrea Mitchell should admit, while goofily grinning and commenting on the economy her husband has ruined, that she has a stake in presenting the story in a certain (wink, wink) way.

Nor did we ever hear Tucker Carlson admit, every time he commented on Plame, that his father was one of the founders of Scooter Libby's defense fund.

Gewn Ifill says "The understanding is we were going to have a debate."

It's never a debate. It's a non-probing interview of 2 people, done in the same room but separately. That's what McCain/Obama's "debate" was and Ifill's was even less of a debate and more of a puff piece interview than McCain/Obama. Sarah Palin may as well have been interviewed on "Entertainment Tonight" for all the probing Ifill did.

Jim Lerher at least tried to get his candidate interview to resemble a debate by asking the candidates McCain and Obama to address each other, and he was pilloried and ridiculed for it. So don't expect to see anything resembling a debate between political candidates anymore. Just expect to see them to wink at the camera and "uh-dress the American people directly" with a lot of unchallenged nonsensical chatter and sentimental twaddle.

Ifill should have recused herself from the debate. Because of her book on race and politics, she deliberately avoided any questions that could be characterized as controversial or biased.. or even interesting. She delivered a puff piece because she was bending over backward not to appear biased. She was hobbled by her own self. It was ridiculous and insulting to Americans to have to sit through that.

She should have handed the interview over to someone else from NPR. That person could have performed a much better interview of the candidates and would have been better able to refute accusations of bias if s/he had asked Sarah Palin to please answer the question asked instead of reciting talking points about an entirely different subject.

when Obama offered to shake his hand.

Classless.

He's the most low class presidential candidate I think I have ever seen.

I want to see video of that disgraceful, classless moment all over the internet tomorrow. If anyone has a link to it, let me know.

Russia is getting rich on oil wealth and we are on a downward trajectory -- in debt, entangled in a money-draining, winless war in Afghanistan (and an even more expensive winless war in Iraq).

Russia doesn't have to support an occupational military in Eastern Europe anymore.

We support an occupational military in the Middle East and Central Asia.

In the USSR, you could be picked up off the street and taken to a gulag to be tortured or locked away in a psychiatric hospital.

In today's America, men who should be locked up in a psychiatric ward (like Dick Cheney) can have you plucked off the street and tortured and sent away to "outsourced" gulags in Cuba, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Democratic foreign countries are asking Russia for economic aid.

Take a good look. This is the Bush/Cheney legacy.

When I first saw this article, I laughed in derision.

Now I laugh with confidence.

I willingly joined and happily paid the money. Then Camille Paglia became a regular contributor. I did not renew my membership and told Salon why.

After a while, Paglia disappeared, thank goodness.

So I resubscribed to Salon.

Then Joan Walsh brought her back. Once again, I let my subscription expire and it will never be renewed as long as Salon chooses to insult my intelligence with this shallow, flippant attention addict.

Ball is in your court, Salon. Paglia's nonsense or my money. But not both.

was murdered on 9/10/2001.

I totally see her allowing that nice, strapping young Roman centurian-like man who knocked on her door today replace her roof tomorrow for $75,000 in cash. She will admire his boldness in demanding the right to cash upfront. She will brush off the snobby protestations from her liberal friends, those elitists who demand such pretentions as a signed contract and some kind of professional license. These pompous liberals are prejudiced against plainspoken working men who are ambitious and smart enough to go door-to-door seeking a job! After all, didn't our own ancestors go seeking work in person? They did not "advertise" or need to be "certified" or "registered" with any authorities!

Our forebearers were brave, bold, brilliant people making their way in the world with their own hands and their own brains, just like this unostentacious traveling roofer is. And we send these good people away from our door at our peril!

Quickly, I am on my way to the bank!