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Now welcome to the award-winning BestOfTheLeft podcast with clips today from CounterSpin.

The Rachel Maddo Show, The Young Turks, La Show, Countdown on the media and The Daily

Show with a bonus video clip for our iPhone app users from The Young Turks.

Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift has long been a TV leftist, despite the fact that she's

never really been on the left. But beyond that problem, sometimes her arguments just don't make sense.

Take her October 15th column, which ran under the headline,

Math Lessons. How did a concept as unsexy and complicated as the national deficit

become the galvanizing political issue of the day? In the column, Clift asks bluntly,

quote, why is the deficit the top issue in voters' minds? Close quote.

Well, as we've pointed out numerous times on CounterSpin, you hear that a lot from political

reporters and pundits, who you don't hear it from is voters, for whom the deficit is not,

in reality, a top issue. Not even close. As the New York Times reported on September 16th,

quote, the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked

to volunteer their worries. Now if only they pull pundits on why they keep insisting otherwise.

Now, two weeks before the elections, it is finally becoming clear what is going to happen in

those elections and why. It had not been clear before, because over the past few weeks in particular,

the media narrative about what's going to happen in this year's elections has turned into a

Republican campaign ad. There has been no daylight over the last couple of weeks between how the

Beltway media has been explaining what's going on in politics and what conservative candidates say

they want to happen in American politics. In other words, the messages that the Beltway media

...