Michelle Obama tells Jay Leno how unimpressed their children are with Barack Obama's upcoming media blitz. Sadly, Malia sounds like my ten year old: as long as it doesn't interrupt their Disney Channel or Nick viewing, they don't pay much attention.

However, Nickelodeon, in an ongoing campaign to get children aware of the election, held an online election between the two candidates, with biographies and education on how we hold elections. Over two million children voted online and they selected Barack Obama as their president of choice. From the mouth of babes...

Don't mess with the nurses! LA Times:

Supporters of Proposition 89, the campaign-finance initiative spearheaded by the California Nurses Assn., have purchased advertising time Wednesday and early Thursday on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" to counter the appearance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

State Treasurer Phil Angelides and his supporters have demanded equal time and sent thousands of e-mails to the late-night show — arguing that federal law requires broadcast entertainment shows to be fair to major candidates. Angelides also asked California affiliates to pull the show. But NBC contends the Schwarzenegger segment should be considered news, and therefore exempt from the rules.

I couldn't believe he got to play this song on NBC.

I'm waiting for the right wingers to mount a protest against Jay Leno and NBC now. Brent Bozell will proclaim "liberal bias" high atop the rafters of the MRC.

Click here for the performance

Daily Kos: Last night, folk-rocker Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes) performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. If you've heard any of his albums, you know Bright Eyes is clearly political (he participated in last year's Vote for Change tour, as noted in the Rolling Stone excerpt I posted below the fold).

But last night's performance was just incredible -- in fact, I'm legitimately surprised NBC even allowed it to air

Some lyrics: When the President Talks to God" When the president talks to God, Are the conversations brief or long? Does he ask to rape our women's' rights And send poor farm kids off to die? Does God suggest an oil hike When the president talks to God?...

Us folks over at Crooks and Liars have been saying for sometime now that "The Daily Show "is able to show more truth and honesty in politics than any other show you might see on TV. Jon Stewart appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show and Bill called his audience "stoners and slackers" and constantly questioned Mr. Stewart on John Kerry's motives for doing The Daily Show, but passing up The O'Reilly factor. , is pissed off that the Daily Show is corrupting our youth and weakening our democracy, or something like that. This goes out to anyone who is disturbed by the fact that a large portion of the country gets their news from the Daily Show.

Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey shows.

Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly, while viewers of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference of 16 percentage points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night programming.

You know what I would really like to see? A comparison between the responses of people who watch the Daily Show and people who watch Fox News. We already saw the comparison showing Fox News viewership was directly linked to people who thought we had found stockpiles of WMD in Iraq and Iraq was working with Al Qaeda, I wonder how well Fox News viewers understand basic campaign positions.