Bad timing, I know.

Sen. Barack Obama defeated Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race a week ago. It was truly moving to watch, even for a cynic like me. It seems like only yesterday that I had actually seen Obama so much in person — in high school multipurpose rooms and at moderately priced hotel conference centers — that I was tired of him. Now he is the President-elect.

Change is coming to the country, and it is coming to this blog. My specified mission here — to examine and document intersections between politics, journalism, and technology — remains unchanged, but I plan to pay more attention to the technology piece. I will try to offer some practical advice based on my experience retooling and subsequently maintaining several high-traffic news sites for the day job.

I promise not to abandon politics, which is still my favorite thing to talk about in real life, but frankly, there is less politics to talk about these days.

Here’s to better days. I promise, if you subscribe to my RSS feed now, you won’t regret it.

It’s clear that the cover is satire, and should any conservatives attempt to cite it as factual rather than ironic, the joke will be on them. There are a lot of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim, and there are a lot of Americans who believe that Michelle Obama is a radicalized, angry Black woman.

But those who buy into that false narrative aren’t reading the New Yorker, and it’s obvious mockery like the cover below that will help put an end to it, as long as enough people see it in the proper context. Over the past three days, I think everyone has heard about it in the right context.

I actually think it’s the subtler magazine covers that present the most danger for misinterpretation. This week’s Newsweek cover (above, left) asks what it thinks is a reasonable question, but it leaves the answer to the inside pages that the vast majority of Americans will never see.

It’s not the answer to the question of “What does Barack Obama believe?” that will drive false narratives about the Illinois senator’s religion and patriotism, it’s the constant, open-ended questioning of it that is most dangerous.

The New Yorker mocks those who question Obama’s patriotism and values, while Newsweek reinforces the question’s relevance. Which do you think is worse?

If Ventura had entered the race, he would have started with 22% support from Minnesota voters. Coleman earned 36% of the vote in a three-way race and Franken attracted 34%.

Stunning. Ventura was a relatively mediocre governor by his own admission. He was a professional wrestler with little interest in the day to day minutia of running a state, from what I’ve gathered. Local media hated him, and he hates them. It just wasn’t meant to be. And yet, had he run, he could well have drastically changed the electoral strategies of both major parties in Minnesota, an important swing state.

This week, it’s 300 economists, whom McCain got to sign on to his economic plan. But to get the signatures, he had to leave some of the more politically important pieces of his plan out. And it turns out not all of the signatories are even supporters of his. Politico got the story:

The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”

There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.

Read the rest here.

For John McCain, it might be salvation. This is his new ad, which spends five seconds trying to imply that Obama would have burned his draft card, if only he had been there. Will it be enough?

Bush loved to cite on the stump the plight of the 4.1 million “subchapter S” companies – another catagory of small businesses that have less than 100 shareholders and pay individual income taxes. As my former Bloomberg colleague Ryan Donmoyer — the best tax reporter in town — pointed out, the argument was a bit ridiculous because less than 5% of small businesses who file under sub-chapter S made more than $200,000, Kerry’s threshold in 2004.

I know folks who voted for Bush over Kerry because of this argument. Those voters likely didn’t know that Kerry’s proposal would only affect the 5% of “subchapter S” companies making more than $200,000 per year.

Is that the Kerry campaign’s fault, for not defending its plan to raise taxes and communicating the details more effectively? No.

Candidates are in this position a lot: the media distorts their position, but clarifying it in public would simply keep the story in another news cycle. And when the story is raising taxes, whether it’s a widespread tax increase or a small, justifiable one, Democrats are rightly reluctant to bring it up in front of cameras.

Questioning the president’s argument was the media’s job.

And yes, some reporters did write about the nuances of Kerry’s tax plan, but editors didn’t put it on Page 1. And Bush made the argument so many times in so many media markets that there were plenty of stories that quoted the president without explaining what was really going on.

Newton-Small demonstrates how easy it would have been for journalists to do their jobs. Take out the sentences setting up the paragraph I quote above, and you’re left with maybe a quarter of a column inch. That’s not a lot of space.

And no, a direct mail firm isn’t on the same level as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, but that became too big a story to credit one online news outlet with everything. The BMW Direct story is all TPM’s.

My reaction to the allegations? I’m not shocked.

Perhaps to those who are used to watching politics on a national stage, who haven’t gotten their hands dirty in races that don’t get the media spotlight, consultants ripping off candidates is a new phenomenon. But away from all the attention, it happens all the time.

Uninitiated candidates who try to navigate the terrain of a campaign alone are unbelievably easy marks.

Among other lessons campaigns can learn from the story is this: the more a campaign can use the Internet to cut out vendors and consultants, the better. Email fundraising will put companies like BMW Direct out of business, or it will at least prevent them from inflating production and delivery costs, since those are effectively zero online.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters. The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list. (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns. Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right? Wrong. Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement.

For one thing, a petition compelling Democrats to stay angry at Obama is just an obviously bad thing for the Illinois senator to have to deal with. Sure he’s getting a list of the names of defectors, but the site is implicitly encouraging defection. (It’s like trying to help the police by encouraging people to shoplift and then giving the cops a list of all the new shoplifters.)

But beyond that, Obama already has access (theoretically, at least) to Clinton’s supporter lists. McCain does not. Every disenchanted Clinton supporter whose name and address reach the McCain campaign is an extra vote the GOP can then target.

So although “I Own My Vote” claims in its page footer that it isn’t affiliated with any campaign, I’m dubious that its owner has no dog in the fight. And since opinionated, frustrated activists are the bread and butter of every online petition drive, it could generate a lot of names for the McCain campaign.