SO I LOOKED AT EDITOR AND PUBLISHER and there’s nothing about the CNN planted-question scandal. There’s one story on the debate, but it’s a puff piece about a cartoonist getting his video in. Then I looked at Poynter and all I could find was this piece on covering the debates. But I’m not seeing anything about the planted-question scandal. I’m not seeing anything at the Columbia Journalism Review site, either. Journalism, cover thyself!

Well, actually I think they are covering . . . .

SOUNDS . . . MARKETABLE: “Scientists at Stanford have reversed the aging of skin in mice, making it look and act like new skin.”

Bring it on. I won’t have this baby face forever.

AT OVERLAWYERED, a roundup on the Dickie Scruggs indictment.

JOHN FUND EMAILS THIS on the CNN debacle. From OpinionJournal.com’s Political Diary:

Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quipped in an interview with Townhall.com that “campaign operatives are people too” and that CNN wasn’t worried if political partisans posed questions at the upcoming GOP debate he was moderating. “We don’t investigate the background of people asking questions (by submitting video clips). It’s not our job,” is how he put it.

But now CNN’s logo has egg splattered all over it, as it scrambles to explain how a co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s veterans’ committee was allowed to ask a video question on gays in the military at Wednesday’s debate and was also flown by the network from California to the debate site in Florida so he could repeat his question to the candidates in person. CNN claims it verified retired Brig. Gen. Ketih Kerr’s military status and checked his campaign contribution records, contradicting Mr. Cooper’s blasé attitudes. Still, they somehow missed his obvious connection to the Hillary campaign which any Google search would have turned up. CNN later airbrushed Mr. Kerr’s question out of its rebroadcast of the debate, indicating that it apparently doesn’t think “campaign operatives” are legitimate questioners at the network’s debates.

Now it appears that an amazing number of partisan figures posed many of the 30 questions at the GOP debate all the while pretending to be CNN’s advertised “undecided voters.” Yasmin from Huntsville, Alabama turns out to be a former intern with the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group highly critical of Republicans. Blogger Michelle Malkin has identified other plants, including declared Obama supporter David Cercone, who asked a question about the pro-gay Log Cabin Republicans. A questioner who asked a hostile question about the pro-life views of GOP candidates turned out to be a diehard John Edwards supporter (and a slobbering online fan of Mr. Cooper). Yet another “plant” was LeeAnn Anderson, an activist with a union that has endorsed Mr. Edwards.

It seems more “plants” are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates. Another questioner worked with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s staff. A former intern with Democratic Rep. Jane Harman asked a question about farm subsidies. A questioner who purported to be a Ron Paul supporter turns out to be a Bill Richardson volunteer. David McMillan, a TV writer from Los Angeles, turns out to have several paens to John Edwards on his YouTube page and has attended Barack Obama fundraisers.

Given CNN’s professed goal to have “ordinary Americans” ask questions at their GOP debate, how likely is that it was purely by accident that so many of the videos CNN selected for use were not just from partisans, but people actively hostile to the GOP’s messages and candidates?

(Emphasis added). It makes it kind of hard to trust CNN.

AMY ALKON LOOKS AT domestic violence.

CANADIAN BEER DRINKERS THREATEN PLANET!

Sounds like a great plot for the next Bob & Doug MacKenzie movie!

I wish they’d make another Bob & Doug MacKenzie movie. But such genius strikes only once.

HELP IS on the way!

IT’S THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM! In Chávez Territory, Signs of Dissent.

SPEAKING OF MISSION CREEP: Googling now counts as stalking. Well, it does if you’re, um, crazy. Or just looking for something bad to say without regard to facts.

HOWARD KURTZ ON CNN AND THE PLANTS: Nice that he’s covering it. But Kurtz reports it in a way that gives a false impression about yours truly:

Conservative bloggers, some of whom deride CNN as the “Clinton News Network,” ripped the network yesterday. At Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds wrote: “Once again, CNN demonstrates an inexplicable failure to background-check pro-Hillary questioners.” Scott Johnson of PowerLine wrote that “CNN has shown itself unable or unwilling to act as an honest broker.” James Joyner, at Outside the Beltway, said: “If lone bloggers can vet these people in less than half an hour, surely CNN’s crack journalistic team should have been able to do so between the time they selected the pool of questions and the airing of the debate?”

I’ve never called CNN the “Clinton News Network.” (I’m not even a “conservative blogger” except in the sense that I’ve supported the war, but nowadays that’s all “conservative” means to most people). And there’s a bigger problem.

CNN’s problem isn’t just bias — it’s a failure of professionalism. Frankly, if bloggers ran some sort of event and were infiltrated in this fashion, the usual media-ethics suspects would be tugging their beards about blogger irresponsibility and praising the superior layers of editors and fact-checkers at Big Media outfits like . . . CNN.

But we learn that CNN did use Google:

He said CNN never spoke to Kerr and had Google, which owns YouTube, bring the retired general and about a dozen other questioners to the debate because their videos were likely to be used, although no final decision had been made.

Using Google for plane tickets is okay. But next time, try using them for . . . Googling. As a commenter at Kurtz’s observes: “What should be noted about this issue is that CNN probably has a whole army of interns and low-level producers who could vet the possible questioners. They ‘could spend hours Googling everybody’, while the top level hacks concentrated on choosing the ‘best’ questions.”

Meanwhile, I’ll just repeat what I said earlier: If Fox hosted a Democratic debate and many of the most pointed questions turned out to come from Republican activists, but Fox didn’t disclose that, do you think it would pass unremarked?

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments: The Presidential Debates are a National Joke.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Good grief.

MORE: Another line from Kurtz’s comments:

So let me get this straight… in the Democrat YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists and in the Republican YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists.

Well, at least they’re consistent.

Heh. Indeed. And a couple of readers note that the media is sometimes more fastidious about who’s asking the questions.

STILL MORE: “Because of the irony.”

ECONOMY INFLATING? NOT SURE. Weather inflating? Sure looks like it:

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year’s 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn “named storm” status.

“They seem to be naming storms a lot more than they used to,” said Frank, who directed the hurricane center from 1974 to 1987 and is now chief meteorologist for KHOU-TV. “This year, I would put at least four storms in a very questionable category, and maybe even six.”

Most of the storms in question briefly had tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph. But their central pressure — another measure of intensity — suggested they actually remained depressions or were non-tropical systems.

A lot of people seem to be interpreting this as global-warming hype, but it’s probably just bureaucratic mission creep. If you’re the National Hurricane Center, you need hurricanes to stay in business. If hurricanes fall off, you’re tempted to cook the books just a bit. Ditto for the rest of the weather establishment. Blizzards are okay, tornadoes good for a bit of quick fun, but hurricanes are the real money-maker, combining intense fearfulness with multiday longevity like nothing else.

ADVICE TO CNN: “Just stop digging.”

IF YOU MISSED IT ON XM RADIO earlier tonight, the latest episode of PJM Political is online now.

HELL FREEZES OVER: Murtha thinks the surge is working.

SO JAMES LILEKS’ NEW BOOK, Gastroanomalies, showed up today. I spent some time reading it and it’s great — the perfect Christmas gift for the foodies you know. If you liked The Gallery of Regrettable Food, you’ll love Gastroanomalies. My favorite so far — the “Everedy Bacon-egger,” a special skillet for cooking bacon and eggs at the same time! Though Earl Warren (yes, that Earl Warren) pitching “the California custom of the olive bowl” has got to be a strong second. But I’ve only made it to page 23 so these may be eclipsed by more favorites later on — up next is “The Wonderful World of Aspics!”

RADLEY BALKO defends public defenders. And rightly so.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

DEFINING AWAY VICTORY: Hey, whatever it takes.

BLOGGING THE CARIBBEAN EARTHQUAKE: Dan Riehl has more.

THE ULTIMATE HD PACKAGE? A bit much for me, but some people think it’s laughably cheap.

UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz emails:

Wouldn’t you much rather have the .50 cal than the HD system? In ten years the M2 will be worth more than you paid for it while today’s fancy-shmancy television system will be obsolete junk. Also, TV is a waste of time but everyone can always use a good gun. This decision should be a no-brainer!

That’s assuming you don’t already own a machine gun, of course.

MICHAEL YON EMAILS: “Just returned from the Syria border back to Mosul. It would take a conspiracy to hide the progress in Iraq.”

He’s also got a new dispatch posted on his time with the British last year.

I LINKED MY LIBEL IN THE BLOGOSPHERE piece yesterday, and shortly thereafter SSRN went down for maintenance. It’s back up now, so here’s the link again if you missed it.

ADVERTISING AGE: “CNN seems intent on finding its few remaining Republican voters and driving them into the arms of Fox News.”

Plus, “At CNN, November is planting season.”

UPDATE: Bob Krumm: “This is crystal clear evidence that CNN has hired the New Republic to do its fact checking.” Ouch!

GRIM ECONOMIC NEWS:

The U.S. economy expanded at the fastest pace in four years during the third quarter, growing at a real annual rate of 4.9%, the Commerce Department said Thursday in making its second estimate of growth for the three-month period. . . . Real GDP has increased 2.8% in the past year, close to the economy’s long-run potential.

Well, it’s grim news for some people. Wonder how much attention it will get? (Via JWF).

UPDATE: More here: “I don’t expect this revision to break out of the business pages.”

IN THE MAIL: Shelby Steele’s new book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.

UPDATE: Some thoughts from the Insta-Wife, who’s actually read the book.