Who: Josh Levin, Mike Pesca and Stefan Fatsis, with guest- Nate Silver What: Slate’s Hang Up and Listen, Live! Where: City Winery When: January 17, 2012 Thumbs: Up “I don’t want it to sound like a tautology” isn’t the kind of concern audibly shared at most sports panels, but while explaining how bad defenses play [...]

Mitt Romney stumbled a bit in his ad debut this week, releasing a spot that disingenuously quoted the President and receiving the expected heat for it. But you wouldn’t know the campaign flubbed judging from his advisers’ comments in the spin room after Thursday night’s debate, where the group was celebrating the attention received for it.

Is Jon Huntsman a phony? According to Slate writer Geoffrey Sant, who is a “commentator on Chinese-language media”, the Utah Governor is not really fluent in Chinese as he has frequently claimed and has bungled it each time he’s spoken it on various news programs. Sant notes that Huntsman has been widely described as fluent [...]

This is fun: Slate has come up with a unique means of showing how the race among the GOP candidates (and at least one potential candidate) has unfolded so far. The site has depicted each candidate as a race horse (jockey included, of course), racing furiously towards the finish line. The closer a horse appears to the end of the race, the higher that candidate’s poll numbers at a given time.

It might be an overstatement to say that Slate‘s Dave Weigel and FishbowlDC‘s Betsy Rothstein have been engaged in a long-running Cold War (perhaps a chilly skirmish?), but however you characterize it, Rothstein reports that a slimmed-down Weigel was considerably warmer toward her at MSNBC’s 15th birthday party.

Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator Jack McCain, recently interviewed Donald “The Donald” Trump for the Daily Beast. And, predictably, the interview is getting quite a bit of negative feedback from around what some people who aren’t me might refer to as the “blogosphere.” Yes, that’s right, it’s H8er Week here at Mediaite. Kick back, grab a Pabst, and go with it.

Ron Schiller, the NPR executive who resigned in the wake of this week’s undercover video scandal, has announced that he’s backing out of his new job–which he accepted ahead of the controversy–as director of the Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Program at the Aspen Insitute.

Poynter’s Jim Romenesko reports Aspen Institute communications director Jim Spiegelman sent an e-mail saying “Ron Schiller has informed us that, in light of the controversy surrounding his recent statements, he does not feel that it’s in the best interests of the Aspen Institute for him to come work here.”

Ah, finally: a neologism related to Sarah Palin not coined by her. With the help of Slate‘s Dave Weigel, fill-in host Chris Hayes gave a spot on Friday’s Countdown to the reinvention of the fake verb “Hannitize”– once used by the man Sean Hannity himself to describe the process by which viewers are converted to his political views, now employed as a way to describe interviews between Hannity and conservatives that have said messy things in the news before going on the show.

A survey of the MSNBC landscape last night has made clear that many of Obama’s fiercest defenders are coming to terms with their disappointment. In honor of this, Slate’s David Weigel dug up a dusty ol’ YouTube clip of Hillary Clinton supporter and union leader Tom Buffenbarger railing against Obama back in 2008. Buffenbarger, Weigel suggests, had it right all along.

Move over, New York Times vs. Wall Street Journal: there’s a new feud in town. Last night, a critical piece about Slate was published on the New York Observer‘s website, sparking a sniping match that might even be interesting to those who don’t work in Manhattan’s news industry.

Keith Olbermann has found some strange rhetoric in the interior memos of the Joe Miller campaign (who defeated Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Alaska Republican primary. “So far,” the note explained, “the Lord has always provided the money.” Except there is now evidence that Miller’s campaign has ties to K Street, and he’s not the first Tea Party-affiliated candidate to fall in the grasp of the larger GOP.

Sarah Palin mans most of her political media empire from the not-so-lofty perch of her Facebook page– a one-stop shop for all of Palin’s latest news, editorials, policy and political moves. Given it’s status as the most reliable hubbub of Palin activity, it takes an extraordinary amount of maintenance to keep it tidy. Today, Slate took a backstage look at what goes into keeping the most democratic part of the page, the wall, nice and clean.

It’s official: the plan to build a mosque and Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero essentially has a green light, despite vast controversy and conservative outrage. Amid the massive media and politics frenzy, three recent columns show the kind of real discussion we should be having in lieu of the rants and fear-mongering that seem to be garnering the most attention.

Defying the advice that it’s better to look for a job while employed, David Weigel is adding Slate to his growing list of jobs after resigning from the Washington Post at the beginning of the Journolist scandal.

In addition to his already announced work for MSNBC, Weigel is now under a one-year contact with WaPo’s corporate sibling Slate to be a political reporter and start a new politics blog, The Upshot’s Michael Calderone is reporting and Weigel confirmed in a tweet.

The world of traditional media has overturned in the past decade – and few have ridden the crest of this wave more savvily than Michael Kinsley. As a pundit on CNN’s “Crossfire,” editing Slate, experimenting with the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, and now at The Atlantic, Kinsley’s philosophy has been an open desire to speak truth to power, and to bend the boundaries of where and how the media engages with its audience. Philip Bump examines the arc of Kinsley’s career, and just how ahead of the curve that arc has been.

The tenth longest novel ever written is the second best selling political fiction book on Amazon.com right now, second only to Glenn Beck’s reinterpretation of the #10 longest novel ever written. George Orwell’s version of Dystopia clocks in at #3. The absolute sales numbers, which show that Atlas Shrugged has sold more than 500,000 more in the past two years than when it was first released, are even more astounding. Are Americans worried about something?

Mediaite’s good friends at Media Matters for America have been all over Dowdygate and provide the first response from Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan, who denies any sexism in accusing Elena Kagan of not being ladylike when she sits in a chair and for wearing dowdy frocks.

Bill O’Reilly is no stranger to making enemies, but this one seemed a little egregious, even for him: during his weekly news quiz segment with Fox News personalities Steve Doocy and Martha MacCallum last night, O’Reilly accused the online magazine Slate of perpetuating lies about Connnecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal‘s swimming skills, and then, that they are “run by a seven-year-old.”

With the White House announcement that Elena Kagan has been nominated to the Supreme Court, it won’t be long until the chattering classes again begin to discuss her (lack of a) personal life and the lesbian rumors. Perhaps more importantly, why should it matter whether Kagan is a lesbian or not?

As we exited the panel, we overheard a couple whispering, “Did he think he’d get away with it?” They were obviously discussing the scandal that brought down Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York. It was that salacious side of Spitzer that brought many to the event, but the topic was only occasionally referenced and hardly discussed. Instead, interviewer Jeff Greenfield opted to focus on the Spitzer of the moment – the virtuous Wall Street fighter who was ahead of his time and is now rumored to be plotting a political comeback. Greenfield wasn’t “forgiving” Spitzer of his past sexual misconduct; he was sticking to the better story.

You know a television show is IMPORTANT television when both The Atlantic and The American Prospect are having online seminars dissecting every nuance, musical note, and unspoken glance. So it is with HBO’s Treme, the newest must-see television show for the media crowd, which premiered this Sunday and is already greenlighted for a second season.

just got back from an excellent panel here in D.C. hosted by Slate and the New American Foundation on the state of the mobile technology industry in the U.S.. Trust me, it was geeky, and I won’t bore you. However, there happened to be some relevance to my favorite issue – traditional media producers trying to hold on to the send-receive transactional messages of old.

Yesterday, Slate released the second in what appears to be a series of profiles in various publications on internet mogul Andrew Breitbart, and for a figure as polarizing as he is, writer Chris Beam paints a remarkably favorable picture. It’s not a glowing biographical sketch but it’s the most candid, three-dimensional look the public has ever gotten of him.

Criticism of cultural immaturity is all the rage lately, with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas both trying their hand at it recently. But another immaturity critique in this week’s Newsweek, this one by George Will, stands out – unfortunately, it does so for the wrong reasons.

The anticipation for tonight’s Super Bowl commercials includes the lead up to the big screen premiere of Google’s Search Stories, released last year to flaunt the ease and accuracy of their search engine. In a minimalist, Apple-style ad a close-up of the ubiquitous search bar tells a story. Tonight’s spot will likely be in an identical style, though the subject may be new. But the beyond witty video team at Slate V had an idea of their own, and it breathes new life into Tiger Woods jokes.