BREAKING: News about Sen. Stevens (R-AK) that’s NOT tied to Veco bribery probe.

TPM Reader DM on the Tube …

Josh

I noticed that youtube feature yesterday or the day before…watching one of your videos. It’s awful, annoying and I’m sure likely to go away real quick.

But for some time now, I’ve come to realize that youtube is probably the worst video sharing service despite its dominance. Metacafe and filecabi.net are better for finding cool/funny/interesting videos and, ironically, google video is way way better as far as resolution and user interface goes. In fact on that last point – user interface and resolution – almost every other service is way better than youtube.

Plus, and this might interest you – metacafe (with whom I have no affiliation) offers cash money for original content based on views. I think it’s $200 per 10,000 views. Not gonna get you out of the flower district, sure, but it’s still some scratch in your pocket.

At any rate, it’s funny that youtube decided to upgrade their service not to make it better but to make it more annoying. Sounds very much like a plan hatched by a bunch of squares in a windowless conference room urging each other to “think outside the box.”

Iran now charged with aiding Taliban according to new ‘intelligence’.

I’ve been watching presidential campaigns pretty closely for more than twenty years. And I’ve certainly never seen a presidential cycle when the Republican field looks more feeble, dispirited and generally languid than this year — which is a real turnabout. But I can’t get past this one point. Mitt Romney. Set aside the familiar propensity to name themselves after small bits of fabric. This guy really rubs me the wrong way.

Of course, by most measure, who cares what I think? It’s not like any of the Republicans are going to get my support. And the target audience for these candidates doesn’t care what I think if they even know who I am. But Romney seems so transparently phoney, so willing to say anything that I find him genuinely frightening. And this is something I don’t feel about any of the other credible Republican presidential candidates, though I obviously have criticisms of each. Romney seems almost like a caricature of the political phoney.

Now, other than warning the country about the terror of a Romney presidency, I bring this up because I’ve always been interested in the dog whistle nature of our reactions to presidential candidates and other prominent political figures. Setting aside all the GOP noise machine blizzard against Bill Clinton, there was clearly a certain kind of person who couldn’t hear Bill Clinton’s voice without thinking he was a two-faced, lying, phoney, say-anything whatever. A lot of that was people who hated him for his politics. A lot of it was because of propaganda for the right. But not all of it. There’s a cultural-political tuning fork out there. And there’s a kind of person who heard Clinton’s schtick and reacted just as I do to Romney. Some mix of cultural assumptions, experiences, regional imprints, etc.

I feel it to an extent with Bush, though nothing like I do with Romney. And setting aside what people feel about Bush now it was, by and large, the people who reacted so negatively to Clinton who heard Bush and thought, why, what a genuine, down-to-earth guy.

So who makes you hear the dog whistle? And what sort of cultural imprint makes some of us hear it with (a shocking phoney like) Mitt Romney and others with Bill Clinton?

Camp Hillary concerned about Iowa?

Former Iowa Governor and Hillary campaign co-chair Tom Vilsack to meet privately with Hillary’s top fundraisers next week.

Former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl breaks his silence about Foleygate: “Foley was a ticking time bomb.” Says he had “dozens” of confrontations with Foley over the years.

Very interesting. Joseph Rich, head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division until 2005 says he suspects Bradley Schlozman may have gone to Craig Donsanto’s superiors to pressure him to approve those election-timed vote fraud indictments.

If you’re lacking the context for the story, you can see a fuller explanation here. But the upshot is that no one knowledgeable about Donsanto, the top guy on election crimes at DOJ, seems to think he would have approved of what Schlozman did unless he was pushed.

A new poll finds that a solid majority of Americans self-identify as or lean Democratic. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

I haven’t had time to dial in on this story. But I think it’s big: massive bribes, kickbacks, whatever you want to call them to Prince Bandar, longtime Saudi Ambassador to the US and still a hugely influential figure in US-Saudi relations. This story relates to arms deal in the UK. But I’d be surprised if it ended on that side of the Atlantic.

Late Update: Now CNN picks up on the story.

Matthews: Rudy’s authoritarianism “helps the [terrorist] bad guys” …