A Voter's Guide for the Tiger Beat Crowd

Regular readers of Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog at Salon.com have already been exposed to both the alleged journalistic integrity of Mark Halperin and scathing analyses pointing out the vapidity of today's Beltway media. In Time magazine's October 22 issue, Mr. Halperin appears to do everything in his power to confirm Greenwald's observations, authoring a two-page spread entitled "On the Fence: A Voter’s Guide to the 2008 Election" (*.pdf) that is notable for it's complete lack of any information whatsoever useful to voters investigating which candidate for president best represents their own views and positions. It is a masterwork of insubstantial pabulum - from an ostensibly respectable news magazine, no less - that simply has to be seen to be believed.

As a public service, for those interested in gaining insight into the candidates that goes beyond the types of junk food they like, a few sites which will be of more use are presented below:

• The Who's Running? site at the New York Times provides fairly in-depth analysis on each of the candidates, corralling biographical summaries, blog posts, personal profiles and even multimedia links.
• MyElectionChoices.com takes voters through a three-step process, asking them to choose issues important to them, answering some short questions about those issues, and then spotlighting the candidates which best match the reader's responses.
• PoliticalBase.com's 2008 Primaries Quiz provides a similar methodology - albeit with a bit less depth - and it's worth comparing results between the two. Also on this site is a handy, graphical comparison chart of candidate positions.
• The Commitment 2008 page maintained by Boston's ABC affiliate, WCVB-TV, features a very flexible side-by-side comparison tool that allows users to read about any two candidates in a head-to-head format.
• Finally, 2decide.com also presents a graphical table of candidate positions, and supplements it further with a chart reflecting campaign funds raised, funds spent and cash on hand.

After you've had a chance to play around on these worthwhile sites, take a minute to enjoy the video below from The Onion. (Warning: Contains mild profanity.) The wits at "America's finest news source" are apparently avid readers of Time and big fans of Mark Halperin. And who can blame them? He's practically writing their material.