Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics is starting soon in Beijing, which is twelve hours ahead of D.C. The NBC stations are starting into wall-to-wall coverage. The games should shut out a lot of national political coverage. We'll see if anything happens to change that.

Lots of buzz lately about Obama's need to hit back harder against McCain. There is a belief among many of the D.C. Democratic media types that negative campaigning doesn't work - that somehow it only hurts the candidate who launches the attack. I'm not kidding. I've heard people who work in that business say just. You know how they know? Because they've heard people in focus groups say they don't like negative ads. Seriously. Ignore what happens in the real world over and over, because of focus groups. We don't have reality-based consultants.

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