Links For The Weekend

If you're going to read just one story this weekend, please, please, please make it this one. Please. (Courtesy Nikhil)

Jon Stewart takes on the despicable, mean and mocking speeches on the third day of the RNC by Romney, Giuliani and Palin. Eight great minutes.

Hamid Mir with another ridiculous piece, this time claiming that Bakhtawar Bhutto found her mother's master plan written on a piece of paper, conveniently located in her purse. Bakhtawar "accidently" happened to discover this piece of paper after the assassination. "Removal of Musharraf was the first point in the plan," we are told. "There are many more." I guess BB is kind of like Machiavelli and Tupac that way, in that her best works will be published posthumously.

John Dickerson very usefully synopsizes the Presidential race:

Here's where things stand: If you look at the latest national polling, Obama is up by an average of about five points. That gap may shrink if McCain gets a bounce from his convention, but with each passing day, national numbers are increasingly meaningless. What's most important now is how things are going in the battleground states. In those states, things look much better for Obama than they do nationally. If you look at the pollster.com map of state polling, Obama has 260 of the 270 electoral votes he needs. John McCain has 186.

If current trends hold, Obama needs only to pick up Virginia and Colorado, two states where he's ahead, where trends favor him, and where he won in the primaries. Obama is not only ahead in all the states John Kerry won, he's virtually locked down Iowa, a state George Bush won. (He's ahead by 15 in the latest CNN poll.)

McCain's best chances to pick up states John Kerry won in 2004 are New Hampshire, where he is tied with Obama, and Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Obama is ahead just outside the margin of error. Yet even if McCain can reverse the trends in those states, he's still only at 241 electoral votes. So he also needs to keep Ohio and Florida in the GOP column (polls are even there) and not give up any of the other states, like North Carolina.

You know, we may bitch and moan about Zardari, but can you imagine having a ruler who has scores of beautiful wives (more than a dozen, generally picked out from a parade of bare-breasted young girls), builds them each a palace, demands the construction of a 15000-seat stadium for the sole purpose of celebrating his 40th birthday, and orders BMWs for each of the visiting dignatries for their "comfort" - all in a country where the average life expectancy is around thirty and two thirds of the population lives in poverty?

A fascinating account of a meeting between Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Barack Obama (via Andrew Sullivan):

Murdoch has traditionally liked politicians to come to him. His historic shift in the 1990s to Tony Blair came after Blair made a pilgrimage to Australia.

Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out (Murdoch executives tried to get the Kennedys to help smooth the way to an introduction), nothing. The Fox stain was on Murdoch.

It wasn’t until early in the summer that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down, knee to knee with Obama, at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?

Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought to share with Obama. He had known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—had met every American president from Harry Truman on—and this is what he understood: nobody got much time to make an impression. Leadership was about what you did in the first six months.

Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.

Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.

That might explain Obama agreeing to go on Bill O'Reilly's show on Faux Noise for an interview.

Finally, Husain Haqqani tells the U.S. cross-border raids aren't helping. The U.S. reaction is something approximating "whatever, dude".