Day 12: October 16

19 days to Election Day

The show opens with a story about two men being beaten at a Sarah Palin rally because they were chanting Barack Obama's name. Their alleged assaulters were a group of 65-year-old women. This story is coupled with a quote from Palin at another rally, where she said that some protesters should be allowed to stay so that they could "learn a lesson." This becomes a larger question about the tone of the campaign, as McCain's debate performance and robocalls are also discussed. Richard Wolffe analyzes what is happening, with Olbermann asking him whether he thinks the beating actually happened, and whether it's McCain's responsibility to curb this violence. This is all speculation and analysis, but on the positive side there's not a lot of bias or game schema involved here.

The next segment is a discussion of Joe the Plumber, both as a person and as a campaign strategy. The discussion's centered on the disconnect between what McCain uses Joe for and what he really is -- he's not making as much money as he claims; there's no way he can buy the business and even if he did, it's worth less than $250,000 a year; and Joe would actually benefit more from Obama's tax plan than McCain's. It's mainly a pretty cynical examination of McCain's campaign strategy -- Chris Hayes says that the campaign "excels at throwing chum in the water" for the press, and calls the JTP phenomenon "transparently absurd," and says that Joe "perfectly sums up the entire mythos that this conservative populism functions on." He also refers to Joe as "another gimmick." It's fairly journalistically biased, all in all.

Next Olbermann gives a list of things McCain said during the debate with questionable truth. Obama is not featured. Olbermann only talks about the mistakes McCain made. This is clearly political bias at work.

The next segment is a "horse race" segment about whether or not Obama could possibly win the election in a landslide. Chris Kofinis joins the show to analyze what is happening -- that is, to speculate -- is complacency a factor for Obama voters? Can Obama really realign the electoral map?

"Worst Persons" is next, with honors going to "Fixed News" for odd racial comments about Colin Powell, "Bill-O the Clown" for claiming that the Sarah Palin porn movie is essentially the same as people yelling "kill him" about Obama, and Diane Fedele for putting Obama's face (along with fried chicken, watermelon, ribs and Kool-Aid) on food stamps. As usual, all three are Republican-related.

Finally, Olbermann talks about John McCain's second effort at making an appearance on David Letterman's show. There's not a lot here, either in terms of positives or negatives. It's just not really news, either.