The Red Carpet is open at the Oscars. I think Miley Cyrus was the first to arrive. The male announcer at E! loved her dress, I didn't, it was too costume-y. His female counterpart called it "bold" but didn't sound crazy about it.The ABC folks didn't like it either.

The LA Times is live-blogging. At past awards shows, they've gotten the best pix up the fastest, we'll see if that continues.

I don't think the actual show will be that exciting -- too many of the nominees, like Slumdog Millionaire, seem certain. And Hugh Jackman as host? [Update: He was great.] For me, the Red Carpet is the main event. I'll be updating with thoughts and photos, hope you will join in. [Updates Below]

Leonard Cohen played Manhattan last night -- his first U.S. concert in 15 years. He's 74 years old. I love so many of his songs, particularly Democracy (clip above), Everybody Knows and Closing Time.

The New York Times gave him a great review: [More...]

The two child actors in Slum Dog Millionaire are en route to Hollywood where they will appear at the Oscars and on the Red Carpet Sunday.

Check out this BBC video interview with them today and watch the squalor that exists in the Mumbai slums.

Slumdog is a shoe-in for Best Picture. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has put his political skills to the Oscars and comes up with these predictions.

Via Digby and County Fair, we get an example of Politico's "journalistic" mission:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likes the Stones. . . . The Times, reporting on her Far East trip, passes along this gem . . . Appearing on a popular Indonesian television show, Mrs. Clinton was asked to name her favorite performing artists — she said the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — but politely declined to sing.

We decided to fact-check . . .

Given the rather bizarre debate between Yglesias and Ezra over Politico, this episode puts it all in perspective - Politico is basically a bad Page 6 for Beltway types - without, so far, the racist cartoons. It covers trivia and gossip - at best, a People Magazine for pols. It really does not merit a discussion of its journalistic qualities. It is not a journalistic enterprise.

Speaking for me only

Below, I wrote a post about a column by David Broder. I disagreed with it, but to my knowledge, Mr. Broder did not misstate any facts. The same was not true of a George will column published earlier this week. Despite this, the Washington Post has not issued a correction of these factual errors. Matt Corley at Think Progress explains:

On Sunday, the Washington Post printed a climate change denial column by George Will that contained several demonstrable falsehoods. Despite the loud chorus of critics pointing out Will’s factual flaws, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has refused to comment on the errors and the column has not received a correction. Will has another column in the Post today, but it too has no correction attached to it for his last column’s obvious factual mistakes.

More . . .

Seeing that High Broderism Nation is crumbling, Broder makes his last stand. Of course, the reality is Broder now has to redefine "bipartisanship" to claim it has a place in politics.

Picking off the support of 1 or 2 Republican Senators now constitutes "bipartisanship." If that is all it means now (when necessary), then I too am a High Broderist for "bipartisanship." Of course that is not at all what Broder meant by bipartisanship before. But this is a good thing. Politics is about defining the middle. "Bipartisanship" has now been defined much further to the Left than before. A win for Obama and progressives.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias seems to be missing this important development. He writes:

Naturally, it got its Drudge link. All for a story about nothing. [Mike] Allen’s response is, I think, the most infuriating. Everyone knows that Mike Allen is an important political reporter. His morning “Playbook,” in particular, helps set the agenda for the whole next day of moronic political buzz. When he writes up a stupid story, he’s not passively predicting that people will be buzzing about it, he’s helping to make it happen. In this case, it didn’t work. Today’s cable news has, overwhelmingly, been about an actual policy question—Obama’s housing plan. And good for cable. But no thanks to Mike Allen.

(Emphasis supplied.) I wrote about this last year, but I get the impression that those still in the Beltway (Yglesias lives in DC) are slow to get it. The Media simply is less important now and getting even less important by the day. Results matter now, not Media talk.

Speaking for me only

Ratings for ABC's The Bachelor are the highest in years. On tonight's show, single dad Jason Mesnick goes from the final three -- Jillian, Melissa and Molly -- to the final two. The reality tv sites (see here, here and here, although they may have too much traffic during the show to get through) are burning up with speculation, not so much about what happens tonight as everything points to Jillian leaving -- but what happens next when he's scheduled to pick between the final two.

Bachelor producer and head honcho Mike Fleiss is fueling the speculation, talking about unusual twists that have never before happened on the show.

I just got off the phone with last season's bachelorette winner Jesse Csincsak, who I interviewed a few weeks ago here. Here's what he said today: [More...]

Josh Marshall is of course right that it is doubtful that Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House GOP Whip, has ever read a book on Churchill, but I think the question is whether Washington Post reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane know much of anything about Churchill. After all it was Shear and Kane who wrote this:

Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party.

(Emphasis supplied.) I do not know what Cantor actually knows or is doing, but I do know Shear and Kane put their names to a story that stated this falsehood (as Josh explains, and as anyone even vaguely familiar with Churchill's life story would know, Churchill did not lead a Tory opposition in the 30s, the Neville Chamberlain government was Tory and Churchill was on the outs with his own party.) This is the Washington Post. Supposedly one of our great newspapers. What a wonderful world it would be if we had a better press corps.

Speaking for me only

Ezra Klein and James Fallows note that Betsy McCaughey is back spinning her falsehoods again on health care. Fallows writes:

In 1994 [McCaughey] wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.

. . . Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. . . . [W]hat is wrong with her "analysis" this time[?] [They are] flatly disprovable lies.

More . . .

In 2003, when Andrew Sullivan still swore undying allegiance to George W. Bush and the economic analysis of Don Luskin, he devoted much of his time attacking Paul Krugman for criticizing George W. Bush. In 2003, Bob Somerby reported on it:

This is now a standard motif of the rube-running right. If you disagree with Bush, you’re a hater—or you have to be crazy. Last Friday, for example, Andrew Sullivan threw pleasing feed to the herd, referring to “the unhinged” Paul Krugman. . . . There’s no such thing as principled disagreement. Those who dispute you are simply unbalanced.

Now the attacks on Krugman as unhinged come from Daily Kos, from DemfromCt, who summarizes Krugman's column today as follows:

Glenn Greenwald:

Ambinder's Atlantic colleague, Andrew Sullivan, quickly praised Ambinder for his "reporting" and -- after arguing just two days ago that Obama was becoming retroactively complicit in Bush's torture program as a result of shielding it from scrutiny -- changed his mind and has now decided that Obama's embrace of Bush's state secrets theory shows how wonderfully "pragmatic" (the all-purpose Obama-justifying term) and thoughtful and sober Obama's governing style is.

More . . .