From Rush Limbaugh earlier this week: "Ladies and gentlemen, as you know (and I have mention this had before) I had a fashionable apartment in New York in the Upper East Side. I'm seriously considering selling it. I have owned it since 1994. I love it. It was second home that I ever bought in my life. I stay there whim rarely in New York. I am "rarely" in New York because I get audited by New York State and City every year starting in 1997, when I moved to Florida; and it's become a hassle that I could tolerate, but it may now become stupid to own any property there."

(Hat tip: PolitickerNY.)  read more »

Correction of the day award goes to The New York Post's Page Six, which ran this item today:

The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

The original item, which ran on October 17th, has been scrubbed from the Post's Web site, but that doesn't mean it hasn't had an impact.  read more »

"I like President Bush," radio host and cigar (et cetera) aficionado Rush Limbaugh wrote in an email to The New York Times Magazine's Zev Chafets in a profile earlier this month. "[B]ut he is not a conservative. He is conservative on some things, but he has not led a movement as Reagan did every day of his career. Bush’s unpopularity is due primarily to his reluctance to publicly defend himself and his administration against attacks from the left."

Luckily for Mr. Bush, Mr. Limbaugh has his back, as this informal chat with the president from his broadcast today shows.

With Mr. Bush's approval ratings at 30 percent (fair-and-balanced footnote: it's nearly as bad for the Democrat-controlled Congress), it seems that Mr. Limbaugh, his radio crew, and perhaps the staff of his reported five-home compound make up the majority of that figure, as this transcript shows:  read more »

There’s a conventional view that John McCain faces an impossible political balancing act.

He badly needs his party’s conservative base to stand with him in November, but that base doesn’t particularly like or trust him. However, if he reins in his more moderate instincts and caters to these activists with the purity and intensity they demand, he’ll do irreparable harm to his standing with independent voters. And, especially with the number of Republican-identifying voters dwindling, victory this fall is unthinkable without substantial independent support.

But is McCain’s predicament problem with his base actually as dire as all that? The most recent data from Gallup, whose daily tracking poll has shown McCain within a few points of Barack Obama for weeks now, has him winning conservative Republicans – that is to say, the Republican base – by a 90-6 percent margin.  read more »

In a memo sent out today by the Clinton campaign, the campaign seems to boast that "In Mississippi, he [Barack Obama] won only 25% of Republicans."

I asked Howard Wolfson on today's generals-for-Clinton conference call why he thought Republicans had come out for her. At first he argued that it was their message of Clinton's strength that was penetrating Mississippi's Republican electorate.

"I think you have seen in both Ohio an in Texas and Mississippi some renewed strength and improvements by Senator Clinton among Republicans," he said. "We believe that is due to the more recent focus in the campaign on issues like those being addressed on this call. We believe that independents, Republicans and of course Democrats are concerned about questions related to Senator Obama's readiness to be commander in chief in day one. And as the election turns on those kinds of big issues we have seen our numbers among independents and Republicans increase."  read more »

John McCain has a new problem with some of his far-right critics. Having made his life miserable in the primary, they seem now intent on wrecking his general election effort before it even starts.

At a campaign event last week, radio talk-show host Bill Cunningham used Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, multiple times in his warm up act for McCain. The very next day the Tennessee Republican Party was back with the same stunt, sending out an official press release using Obama’s middle name.  read more »

Following John McCain’s victory in Florida last week the chorus of McCain-hatred grew louder on talk radio shows and on many conservative blogs.

Rush Limbaugh declared that McCain was not conservative and unacceptable as a candidate. Formerly respectable conservative figures took delight in criticizing McCain’s war record—yes, his war record—by tallying up the number of planes he had lost in combat. Ann Coulter and James Dobson, a social conservative leader and head of the Focus on the Family organization, declared McCain so indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton, the featured villainess in any conservative drama, that they would vote for her or stay home.

In short the McCain villifiers doubled down on their bet that they could derail McCain and lift their favored alternative, Mitt Romney, to victory.  read more »

Certain conservative opinion makers are not pleased.

Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, much of the roster at the National Review and many (but certainly not all) of their more conservative talk radio and blogger colleagues are beside themselves at the prospect that one of the Republican contenders they deemed to be “not conservative” might be nominated. As Mike Huckabee won Iowa, John McCain took South Carolina and Fred Thompson bestirred himself to draft a note withdrawing from the race, the fretting has intensified. How could the voters reject their advice?  read more »

The controversy over what Rush Limbaugh meant when he uttered the phrase “phony soldiers” last week isn’t just another broadcast sideshow.  read more »