CNN stinks!

I'm a little late in condemning CNN for its awful handling of last week's You Tube debate among Republican presidential candidates, so I'll leave it to Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times to say what I should have said days ago.

Why do the media bother with crap like this?

If you thought last weekend's Iowa Straw Poll on the race for the Republican presidential nomination was meaningless (and it was), what do you make of the Illinois Straw Poll?

What? You didn't know that any such poll had been scheduled in Illinois? Well, hardly anybody else did either. It was conducted during Republican Day festivities Thursday at the State Fair in Springfield. About 1,000 people cast ballots, and Mitt Romney led the pack with 40 percent of the vote.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with GOP fairgoers having fun with their little poll. It is wrong, however, for the media to report on the matter, as CNN and others have done. Such coverage conveys the message to the gullible that the results of this poll actually are significant, which they're not.

What's worse is that State Republican Chairman Andy McKenna (pictured above) is such a dunderhead that he publicly characterized the outcome of this silly exercise as exciting evidence that Romney "has begun to put together a strong statewide organization."

No wonder the Illinois Republican Party is a basket case.

Paula's out, but Wolf stays?

I'm no fan of Paula Zahn, and I don't object to CNN cashiering her (although it didn't have to be done so gracelessly). What I don't understand is why Wolf Blitzer still has a job.

As we noted here six weeks ago, and as anyone with an I.Q. above room temperature can discern, Blitzer is awful.

Why not dump him in favor of...oh, I don't know...anybody with a brain?

Is Wolf Blitzer the worst or what?

From his ever-present, phonus-balonus pen and note-paper props to his monotous droning to his...well, to almost everything about him, CNN's Wolf Blitzer is the worst news host on national television.

(Well, OK, some of the creeps on Fox are worse. But still...)

As a moderator in presidential campaign debates, Blitzer's beyond bad. On that score, Madison blogger Griper Blade adroitly nails the Wolf man.

Lou Dobbs gets his comeuppance

CNN's resident xenophobe apparently has been peddling some falsehoods about illegal immigrants, earning himself a smackdown from David Leonhardt of The New York Times.

One of Lou's distortions has to do with incarceration rates among undocumented immigrants, which was the subject of this post by The Rascal a few weeks ago.

I told you this was going to be fun

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seems not to be doing himself much good with his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

One Republican member of the panel declared that Gonzales should resign, and CNN is reporting that White House officials are greatly dismayed at the AG's performance.

Why doesn't the Bush administration cut its losses here and show the man to the door? After all, most Americans want him out, and that situation is not likely to change unless he suddenly comes up with a cure for cancer or singlehandedly captures Osama bin Laden.

But then, even if Gonzales quits, the fuss over Prosecutorgate probably isn't going to just disappear.