UPDATE: Ms. Fisher and I spoke for about 45 minutes about online media, the growing blogging community in Arkansas, and the impact of technology on media, politics, and business.  It appears our discussion was timely, because John Brummett has a column today lamenting these things.

For whatever reason he also attacks KATV’s “Choose Your News” program, one that I view to be an interesting and clever way to allower traditional viewers (and online users) to develop a relationship with KATV and play a role in the generation of content.  Even in its infancy, it appears to be working.  Participating last night in the Daily Debrief, a streaming video aspect of the overall “Choose Your News” program, Fisher and I fielded dozens of questions submitted in real time via e-mail and instant message on an array of topics related to online media.

Ms. Fisher has her own blog, too, and I assume she’ll provide a response to Mr. Brummett there.  And in twitter posts.  And on the streaming video from her site.  And on television.  How fitting it would be.

As many readers here know, I’ve been very interested in the decline of newspapers in the face of growing interest in the online space.  See: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here.  To Mr. Brummett’s point about the intersection of traditional newspapers and technology, consider this.

In 2006, Stephen Gray of the Newspaper Next initiative of the American Press Institute observed, “Newspapers are uniquely positioned to capture this land rush, but not if they don’t grasp the opportunity.”  According to a survey conducted by Next, “newspaper managers that found that 72 per cent of them did not know how to change their business to accommodate the digital age.”  He further argued that newspapers need to “sustain core products while embracing and developing their own new ‘disruptive’ products that responded to information needs of the public.”  He concludes, “”It would pain me to see the vast resources that newspapers have just piddled away into insignificance.”

Douglas McLennan, writing for the National Arts Journalism Project, observed in an article titled, “Who Put These Guys in Charge (Why Newspapers are Failing),” “Pretty much every online initiative in the traditional news industry has been me-too-ism rather than bold invention. . . Reporters and editors are pressed to add digital duties - blogs, podcasts etc - as add-ons to their “regular” jobs instead of incorporating the digital world as essential tools that should make their ability to gather and tell stories and interact with their communities easier. This shouldn’t add to the work load (but always seems to). Instead, these things ought to make reporting easier.”

Enter president-elect Barack Obama who said this while appearing on “60 Minutes:”

“I think any sensible person would say that, if you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear, decisive winner, that we should be creating a playoff system. Eight teams, that would be three rounds to determine a national champion. It would — it would add three extra weeks to the season. You could trim back on the regular season. I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

There’s another reason why I voted for this guy. Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post notes, “it’s become the No. 1 topic this week in college football and forced another national discussion that those of us with good sense not only welcome, but find a relief.”

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports appeared on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and said this about Obama:

“If he’d just gotten up there like Bill Clinton and said, ‘I feel your pain, Auburn fans. The BCS must go. We must tear down this BCS wall.’ I honestly think if he had embraced this, he could’ve won 49 states. Alaska, with no college football teams and governor Sarah Palin probably would’ve been impossible to topple, but everyone else would’ve gone his way…”

If you’re a true fan of the BCS (which means you lack sense and reason), then imagine this doomsday scenario from Tony Barnhart, one of the leading analysts of the game:

• Oklahoma beats Texas Tech in a thriller
• Florida State beats Florida
• BCS standings heading into championship Saturday: 1) Alabama; 2) Texas; 3) Oklahoma; 4) Texas Tech; 5) USC; 6)Florida
• Florida beats Alabama in the SEC Championship Game
• Texas loses to Missouri in the Big XII Championship Game
• Oklahoma and Texas Tech move to 1 - 2 in the BCS rankings and are set to play in the BCS Championship Game (Voters try to prevent this by voting UCS #2, but the computers kick them down to #3)
• BUT Missouri has the automatic bid to the BCS by virtue of winning the Big XII. BCS rules state that no more than two teams from any one conference can participate in the BCS. There is nothing in the BCS by-laws governing this scenario.
• Chaos reigns

Jim Harris of Arkansas Sports 360 and Wally Hall of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette need to weigh in on this.

UPDATE: Josh Levin of Slate has stepped into this discussion, which continues to get a lot of attention nationally.  He writes, “It’s worth remembering that the BCS itself wasn’t created as an equitable way to determine college football’s national champion. Rather, it was designed as a candy coating to make the same old scheme—with its massive payouts to the major football conferences—go down easier.”

On Obama’s idea, Levin opines, “If Obama is serious about his playoff proposal, he needs to start working over America’s leading football institutions: the athletic conferences and the presidents of universities with powerhouse football programs. This will prove about as easy as getting the U.N. Security Council to authorize an invasion. For the university presidents, the best argument in favor of the BCS is that everybody’s already getting rich—why mess with a good thing?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

The film, released in 1940, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and it earned Mr. Ford his second of four directing Oscars.  Mr. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, and the committee cited this novel as one of the main reasons for awarding him the prize.

The book is certainly revelant in todays economic times.  The term depression commonly used by economic prognosticators and forecasters who frequent the cable news programs.   It is said that “The Grapes of Wrath” had a profound impact on President Roosevelt.  With his reading list growing, I wonder if it should be at the top of President-elect Obama’s stack.

My thought: It’s smart politics to keep Lieberman where he is, as bitter of a pill to swallow as it may be.  If the Democrats win the contested Senate seats in Alaska, Georgia and Minnesota, they’ll have 58 seats in their favor.  If you include Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also an Independent, and Mr. Lieberman, that’s a 60 seat majority, and filibuster proof.

But liberals in the blogosphere are going to go nuts. They’ve already tried to run Mr. Lieberman out once before by actively supporting Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut Senate race (the very active liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga a/k/a Daily Kos appeared in a Lamont ad). Mr. Lamont beat Mr. Lieberman in the primary, but Mr. Lieberman ran as an Independent in the general election and won. Do they have reason to be furious? Sure. Mr. Lieberman’s self-righteous admonishment of President Bill Clinton on the Senate floor started it all.  Then he proved to be a miserable VP candidate and fundamentally weak during the recount battle in Florida.  After the 2000 election, he spoke unkindly about Gore’s policy positions during the campaign. What followed was a move to the far right on the war in Iraq before launching his own bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2004 (Mr. Gore endorsed Howard Dean). He then bucked the Democratic Party entirely to back Mr. McCain. During the 2008 campaign, not only was Lieberman was rumored to be on McCain’s short list for VP, he also courted groups like Christians for a United Isreal, whose founder, John Hagee, later endorsed Mr. McCain. That endorsement was rejected on the grounds that Hagee’s comments were, well, hateful and bigoted.

UPDATE:   Speaking in favor of Lieberman: John Kerry, Dick Durbin and Ben Cardin.

Speaking against Lieberman: Pat Leahy, Bernie Sanders.

Kinkade says that modest gains in Arkansas by the GOP is progress that counts for a lot.

But beyond this, there is troubling news over at The National Review.

As I noted here earlier this year, Christopher Buckley, son of the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama for president, and was quickly shown the door. Today, The New York Times reports that David Frum, a prominent conservative writer, is leaving to launch a Web venture. Over at The Corner, the National Review’s influential blog, you can read comments by a few of the magazine’s contributors.

Yes, like all people, magazine writers move around. But Frum isn’t just any magazine writer, and NR isn’t just any magazine. Or maybe it is now that Mr. Buckley is gone. It’s hard to imagine Mr. Buckley fawning over Palin the way many of the editors and writers there did (one of Frum’s concerns was with the backlash he received after writing negatively about her), but we’ll never know.

But I cannot be unfair to the magazine. After all, I’m hardly a regular reader. I pay attention to Frum and Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer because they’re smart guys even if we disagree consistently (as an aside, Krauthammer wrote this piercing editorial about John Edwards, and I agreed with every word of it.) Peggy Noonan and David Brooks don’t write for NR, but I rarely miss a word (they were both critics of Mrs. Palin; Mr. Brooks described her as “cancer to the Republican Party.”)

In late October, E.J. Dionne, writing in The New Republic, observed, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity–and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.”

Like everywhere else in life, it’s easy to pile on the defeated in politics. Aside from the score-keeping, one thing the GOP has always been good at is idea generation. After all, that’s the primary reason Buckley founded NR, and it served as adequate justification for rarely turning a profit.

Which brings me to a larger question. In the Times‘ article Mr. Frum notes, “I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.” I’ve been pondering this for past few weeks. Exit polling demonstrates that young people and the well-educated voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama. For the first time in eight years, the Democratic Party proved to be the party of ideas.

President George W. Bush will leave office with the lowest approval rating in history, and the comparisons to Herbert Hoover are becoming more accurate as this troubled economy sinks further towards a depression. Barring a Clinton-esque transition gaffe(s), president-elect Obama will enter The White House with approval ratings nearing seventy percent, and substantial majorities in both houses of Congress.

If Mr. Dionne is right, and the GOP think tank is being led by propoganda mongers Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mrs. Palin, I am saddened. That may sound strange coming from me (after all, it’s about winning, isn’t it?), but let’s be honest. With our economic future in jeopardy; two concurrent wars being fought thousands of miles away; and an energy crisis like nothing we’ve ever seen, it’s time to populate the marketplace with ideas.

But the GOP is polarized. Former presidential candidates are taking swipes at each other, and no one, not even NR, seems to know which way is up. As good as it has proven to be for Democrats in the short-term, how will Americans fare in the long term?

It’s actually a pretty weak day for football all around.  The LR Central Tigers didn’t even sniff a win, much less the playoffs, so I’m not as focused on the high school football as I normall would be.  And can I really get fired up about Notre Dame - Navy; Florida - South Carolina; Auburn - Georgia?  Dunno.  We’ll see how the day goes.

It could be a good day for movies and books. “Quantum of Solace,” the 22nd James Bond film, opened last night.  It’s no “Casino Royale,” but there’s some cool stuff and pretty women.  Mathieu Amalric (of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) is an impressive (if under-utilized) villain.  But the song really sucks.  If you live in big cities, like New York, you can see “Slumdog Millionaire,” “A Christmas Tale,” “I’ve Loved You So Long,” and “Synedoche, New York.”  You should go see them. I live in Arkansas, so I can go see “Saw V” (that’s an exaggeration, of course.  I can also see “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”).

Tomorrow, The New York Times Book Review assesses a new biography on the late George Plimpton, of “The Paris Review” among other literary and interesting achievements.  “In these crazy, mixed-up times, George is a character to be fondly remembered, a hero of sorts, and a charmed and charming partner in his own spirited dance to the music of time,” writes Graydon Carter in his review.

My fall reading list is almost complete.  I’ll look forward to a lot of holiday.  I’ll pick up the Plimpton book, and finish “Herzog.”  Recommendations are welcome.

The November 17th issue of The New Yorker is loaded with great political writing.   Free admission to the Clinton Presidential Library, too, if you’re in LR.

That should be enough for a Saturday. Enjoy it. I’ll check back in tomorrow.