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Yes, the Hardball host started a fundraising phenomenon in the 6th congressional district in Minnesota with his Oct. 17 MSNBC interview with incumbent Michele Bachmann. She called for a media investigation into members of congress to see which of them might be anti-American.

But, Chris, come on. Be a little generous to the internet effect. You implied on Monday night's show that it was entirely the power of your show that drove outraged viewers to contribute hundreds of thousands to Bachmann's opponent.

You did good, but what you did was to start a viral effect. Check out the blogs that helped spread the influence of your interview in the first few days. Factor in the rabid use among politics junkies of microblogging tools like Twitter that have replaced our RSS readers to pass around these blog and video links, and there you go.

A single interview in isolation would not have caused the Democratic National Committee to take notice of Elwyn Tinklenberg's campaign. Thank you for getting the snowball rolling, but individual contributions flooded in from the combined influence of your interview and the net effect. The DNC recognized the resultant phenomenon. There was a team at work here, and as quarterback it would be gracious of you to acknowledge the whole squad.

See the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report for details.

Don't be fooled by John McCain's shell game. It's not plumbers that he and the Republicans are concerned about. All the railing against "spreading the wealth around" is focused on keeping the trend going just the way it's been headed.

The GOP always uses small business as a dodge to persuade ordinary folks they should favor policies benefiting the base that Republicans listen to when it's not election season -- big companies and the very rich. George Bush was fond of traveling to little machine shops or other blue-collar settings to talk about business taxes. Nice trick.

The heartland buys it, too, and that worries me a little. We're still living in the Cold War era in so many ways. The Red Scare still works.

Fact is a lot of economists, including Alan Greenspan, think the growing disparity in income in the U.S. is dangerous for the economy. The gulf hasn't been this wide (.pdf file) since that other depression.

Hasn't it been interesting to note how many of Barack Obama's newspaper endorsements mention Sarah Palin as a reason to distrust John McCain's judgment? Colin Powell featured the VP pick in his bill of particulars against McCain, too. You could almost pick up his thought waves saying "I'll be damned if I'll ever address her as 'Madame President.'"

You have to think McCain must wince each time an Obama endorser brings Palin into the equation, but maybe not. He's lacked that GOP adoration for so long, it could be he's seduced by the cheering throngs, and it blinds him.

But if I were McCain, here's the thing that would bother me: Palin contradicts his message of bi-partisan harmony -- just grinds it up and stomps on it. She's so polarizing that she erects a barbed wire fence in that aisle he says he likes to reach across.

I was about to get all huffy, but no.

Hulu offers embeddable video. If you're trying it out with a local file, as I did, and thought it wasn't resizable -- that it was clipped rather than scaled from the 512-pixel width -- just publish it anyway. It actually does scale like YouTube or most other embeds, once you get it online.

For example here is last night's SNL Weekend Update.

I've limited the width to 450 pixels because that's the space I have available for it in the main column of my blog.

These days, to figure the proportion for such things, I fire up Paint Shop Pro. (I don't want to pay for Photoshop at home, and though I remember how to solve for X, I've grown too lazy to haul out the pencil.)

I think I threw away my proportion wheel 35 years ago right after I took a newspaper editing class. You'd measure a photo, then slide the wheel to match up the photo width with the column width. The wheel calculated the column height, so you could draw a box of the correct number of column inches on your layout, and a percentage, so you could scribble it on the photo with a grease pencil.

Terri Ann Wintermute, running for Illinois State Senate, is all over the news shows with her TV ads. She's a Republican, though you'd never know it, since the fact isn't mentioned in audio or even on an end tag in her commercials.

The campaign must have calculated that Barack Obama's approach in tying John McCain to the president is paying off because Wintermute borrows the line and brings it down to the state level in stating that her opponent has voted with the governor 90% of the time.

Now a new ad rides on the faux coattails in another way, by charging that her opponent wants to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Come on!

Advice to the low-info voter:

• Wintermute is a Republican.
• Republicans always want to give tax breaks to the wealthy (they still want you to believe it will trickle down to you).
• Her opponent is Linda Holmes. She's the Democrat. Vote for her if you live in Illinois's 42nd District.

What a crazy mixed-up set of ideologies this financial and McCain meltdown has thrown us into. GOP candidates are likely to lay claim to any old position that sounds like it might be popular. Voters will have a hard time sorting it out since McCain -- who should serve as the party's leader -- is no compass for them. He's eager to play populist and to please the base at the same time. He's all over the place, and so is every other GOP candidate.

What's a voter to think?

Just vote a straight Democratic ticket. It's a much safer bet this time around.

What persuaded John McCain to see that the hateful course his campaign has been pursuing for the past 10 days is counterproductive?

I'd like to think part of it was common decency. Another part may have been a wish to inoculate himself from blame if, God forbid, some horrible act should be carried out by a whipped-up partisan.

Other factors might include the growing number of Republican politicians and talkers who have come out to say he's going down the wrong road, and the polls that show his attempts to soil Obama's character can be brushed right off like so much clean sand.

If McCain is smart, and I do think he's at least shrewd, the tipping point may have been his realization of the truth in this statement by John Weaver, a former adviser who was sent away in last summer's campaign staff housecleaning:

“And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

I imagine that in a moment of campaign fatigue, McCain experienced one of those precious bursts of insight. You know those times when you're able to squint a little, step back from the details and see the whole picture? Maybe he was chilling in a hotel room, and glanced at the TV news, watching a Sarah Palin rally not from the stage or as part of a prepared clip reel, but the way voters see these orgies of political emotion.

He saw a Palin rally full of agitated faces, and arms thrusting signs into view with an excess of exuberance, and a chorus of booing that registered louder than the cheering.

Finally his gaze may have fallen on the face of his VP pick, and he understood how much she enjoys it all, how greedily she feeds off the negative energy.

Chorus from "Kill the Beast," Disney's Beauty and the Beast:

We don't like what we don't understand
In fact it scares us,
And this monster is mysterious at least.
Bring your guns, bring your knives,
Save your children and and your wives.
So save our village and our lives,
KILL THE BEAST!

Get Meg Ryan to play Cindy McCain.

Who wrote the first two words that came out of Tamarin Hall's mouth this morning at the 9 o'clock hour?

"Running scared."

She was talking about the market. Hardly helpful.

Newspapers, magazines, politics blogs, network news and cable news: please don't be seduced by the controversy the McCain campaign is introducing into the race.

You know they're angling for wall-to-wall coverage on a Rev. Wright level in an effort to distract us from news about the economy. It can't work this year unless you enable it. Do you imagine we care about what some old hippie did 40 years ago when our personal economies are crumbling around us this morning?

If you must, give the latest smear four inches or two minutes -- the way you might treat whatever happened in Iraq or Afghanistan today.

Same goes for liberal bloggers and Olbermann and Maddow. Sure, you want to lead the outrage, but doesn't that only feed the beast? People are interested this cycle. They're going to watch and read anyway. You don't need to stoop to this.

Do the right thing. Don't buy into the contrived drama. You're better than that if you want to be. Thanks.