Charlie Gibson on ABC's World News Tonight: The cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe stems from the fact that the country is "paralyzed by political infighting."

There's a tyrant, Robert Mugabe, who wrecked the country, murdered opponents with impunity, drove his opponent into exile, and still came in second in the first round of presidential voting. There's an opponent who, after brutal repression, withdrew from the second round, calling it a "violent sham." Since then, under international pressure, he has scrambled, with indifferent success, to negotiate some leverage. The resulting situation, in the view of ABC News, is characterized as "political infighting."

And I'm the queen of Bavaria.

The estimable Steve Fraser has a piece worthy of note up at Tomdispatch. Not the part that grumbles indiscriminately about Obama's prospects for good deeds on the basis of nothing but the fact that his looming appointments have experience in the government. I too am disturbed that no one directly representing labor is included among the councils of economic advisers, but December is a bit early, I think, to haul out the big guns and declare that, in foreign policy, for example, we confront what he calls "an "Obama-Clinton-Bush (the father) foreign policy establishment." Give the guy a few weeks in office, for Chrissake, before consigning him to the selloutocracy.

But to the subject of Fraser's more constructive side:

A real democratic nationalization of the banks -- good value for our money rather than good money to add to their value -- should be part of the policy agenda up for discussion in the Obama era. As things now stand, the public supplies the loans and the investment capital, but the key decisions about how they are to be deployed remain in private hands. A democratic version of nationalizing the financial system would transfer these critical decisions to new institutions created by the Congress and designed to pursue public, not private, objectives. How to subject the flow of credit and investment capital to public control ought to be on the drawing boards if we are to look beyond the old New Deal to a new one.

Or, for instance, if we are to bail out the auto industry, which we should -- millions of jobs, businesses, communities, and what's left of once powerful and proud unions are at stake -- then why not talk about its nationalization, too? Why not create a representative body of workers, consumers, environmentalists, suppliers, and other interested parties to supervise the industry's reorganization and retooling to produce, just as the president-elect says he wants, new green means of transportation -- and not just cars?

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From Mike Allen at Politico (pardon my italics):

NBC News plans to name David Gregory as moderator of "Meet the Press," infusing one of television's most prized franchises with a sharp edge leavened by a youthful style and versatility, according to network executives.

Gregory, 38, celebrated his 30th birthday -- complete with cake -- aboard George W. Bush's presidential campaign plane, the assignment that solidified his stature as a network rising star.

Eight years on, Gregory has not distinguished himself for independent thought, though a certain grumpiness won him an easy reputation for such among people who think that a birthday cake on a campaign plane is what solidifies "stature." See here for an interesting item from the Columbia Journalism Review. Here are some questions I raised about Gregory's acumen in August. Here he was his penetrating question of Sen. John Thune (R, SD) at midnight after Sarah Palin's St. Paul speech: "Senator [John] Thune, was a star born here tonight with Sarah Palin?"

I try not to rush to judgment. I'm trying. Trying.

From Roger Cohen on today's NYT site, a timely recommendation:

I think Olmert's words should be emblazoned on the wall of Hillary Clinton's eighth-floor State Department office: "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage elsewhere -- without this, there will be no peace."

Asked if this included a compromise on Jerusalem, Olmert said, "Including Jerusalem."

He also declared, "I'd like to know if there's a serious person in the state of Israel who believe that we can make peace with the Syrians without, in the end, giving up the Golan Heights." Those words should go up on Clinton's wall, too....

Getting to...a two-state deal at, or close to, the 1967 borders will require concerted U.S. involvement from day one of the Obama administration. Its tone should be one of tough love, with the emphasis on tough.

Time's Mark Halperin has found his moral compass. According to Alexander Burns at Politico, he's decided that

"media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history."

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

If the quote is accurate, Halperin overlooks the Swift Boat coverage of 2004 and the Bill Ayers-fest. According to Burns' piece, the sole example of bias that Halperin gives is the comparison between a "vicious" NYT slash-and-burn job on Cindy McCain compared to their puff piece on Michelle Obama.

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Yesterday's maladroit WP headline "Some in Arab World Wary of Clinton; One Issue: Whether Probable Secretary of State Would Be More Hawk Than Dove," mischaracterizes the Michael Abramowitz piece it adorns. It isn't till the 20th paragraph that a single Arab is quoted, and then it's one Palestinian characterizing other Arabs:

Amjad Atallah, who formerly served as a legal adviser for the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with the Israelis, said the prospective Clinton nomination is being watched warily in the Arab world, given her unstinting support for Israel in recent years and hawkish comments on Iran. Some worry that her selection is a possible indicator that Obama may not be as aggressive as Palestinians hope in pushing for a peace deal.

"Nobody has a negative opinion of Senator Clinton, except maybe that her opinions are closer to the neoconservatives than they might wish," Atallah said.

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Conceding, McCain paid tribute to African-Americans, and honored Obama for--having defeated him.

Everyone is calling him gracious--on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rep. John Lewis, for example. I suppose he was. What he couldn't bring himself to do: compliment Obama for the way he conducted himself; for any of his talents; for any ideas; for his character.

Beneath the velvet, it was faint praise. A bitter night for Sen. McCain, to be sure.

Peruvian shamans check in. I won't spoil this by saying whom they prefer.

That's the punchline of a Minister of Hate ad run by something called GOPTrust just now--on MSNBC, during Olbermann's show.

James Fallows same the same ad a few hours ago on MSNBC in California. He saw it several times. I saw it in New York. So some Republican outfit, on election night, is throwing money away on Keith Olbermann fans in the safest states in the universe.

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At cjr.org, Renee Feltz, citing research by John Kelly, pinpoints a key difference between the Obama and McCain campaigns' use of the Internet. Turns out there really is a difference in spirit--between a lateral, interactive approach and a top-down one. Guess which is which.

You guessed it:

Barack Obama's campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain's campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs--many of which it helped incubate--as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.

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I spoke last night on Obama and the transformational possibilities that would open up with his victory, to an overwhelmingly friendly congregation at Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, on Long Island. During the Q-and-A, a man halfway back in the audience started shouting: "You have no business here! Shut up! Get out! Obama hates Israel! You hate Israel! You're anti-American! You're a Communist!" And so on. (I think there was something about terrorists, too, though I'm not sure, the acoustics not having been designed for enraged disruptions.) The shouter had to be, as they say, escorted out. Rabbi Robert Widom closed out the evening with an impassioned appeal for civility. Without question he spoke for his deeply embarrassed audience.

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I wrote three weeks ago about Sean Hannity featuring the longtime anti-Semitic propagandist Andy Martin in his hour-long screed against Obama on Fox News. Now here's Howard Kurtz in Monday's WP:

Martin said on the show that Obama's community-organizing work in Chicago was "training for a radical overthrow of the government." The onetime political candidate has a history of making controversial statements. In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, according to the Chicago Tribune, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew" and described Holocaust survivors in a filing as "operating as a wolf pack." Martin has denied holding anti-Semitic views....

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Slate's Jack Shafer, inveterate practitioner of the countercyclical twist-and-reverse, warns that "tiny tendrils of trepidation are starting to drift over the liberal members of the commentariat and the political press corps." Not because they fear Obama will lose, but because they're so enraptured by him, "so convinced that his candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering," so "in love with the idea of Obama, of the 'meaning' of his run for the presidency," that they're courting "performance anxiety." "How," he wonders, "do you pack all the Obama touch points--healing, hope, change, civility, the second coming of Camelot, post-boomer politician, inspirer of youth, great uniter, world president, and so on--into one story without sounding hagiographic?"

Speaking for myself, I make no apologies for hearty enthusiasm, even spells of giddiness, whiffs of overconfidence calling for iron realism which then gives way to musings about this moment's transformational possibilities, the obstacles to same, and the Meaning Of It All. What with America's long-running abdication of moral nerve, a ruinous war, piles of spectacular malfeasance in high places and manifold abominations of the last eight years, any writer alive to the moment may be forgiven a touch--or more than a touch--of the rhetoric of wild aspiration. Hell, even an analytically tinctured gloat or two about the ruptures of the conservative movement is acceptable in my book.

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Here's a nifty new resource from Ph. D. student John Kelly, who when he's not getting his degree in Communications at Columbia is teaching at Harvard's Berkman Center. Go to his Morningside Analytics site and you can see how many liberal and conservative blogs link to the 100 top political YouTube videos over recent days. You can thus, in his words, "Measure the Movement of Ideas through Social Networks."

Joe the Plumber is, it seems, a registered Republican. (Hat tip to Ben Smith of Politico, who got the item from the Toledo Blade.) Moreover, according to the logical Jed L at Daily Kos, he wasn't undecided either:

Speaking with Katie Couric, "Joe" said that he "wasn't swayed" by the debate last night, yet pretty much knew who he was going to vote for. So if (a) he wasn't swayed by the debate and (b) knows who he is going to vote for, then (c) he had already made up his mind before the debate.

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