An e-mail sent to millions of Americans claims that Hillary Clinton has refused to meet with mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq. Another claims that Barack Obama was educated as a Muslim extremist. In yet another e-mail hoax, Mike Huckabee's campaign manager has supposedly resigned, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney. None of these stories are true, but Christopher Hayes thinks they may be changing the game of politics. The anonymous "e-mail forward" has become a "new right-wing smear machine," he reports. "Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself," but "never has there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. ... For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. ... Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns find themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004 when the Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and e-mail. If you respond, you run the risk of bringing the original false accusation to a wider audience."

From a Center for Union Facts TV adCorporate-funded attack dog Rick Berman, who has previously attacked Mothers Against Drunk Driving, tobacco control advocates and critics of fast food, is on the warpath against teachers' unions. In a speech at the Conservative Leadership Conference in Sparks, Nevada, Berman said "everybody should be afraid" of unions and warned that the Employee Free Choice Act, currently being considered in Congress, could lead to explosive growth in union membership and "change politics in this country forever." Teachers' unions in particular need to be attacked, he said, because people normally tend to like and trust teachers. "We have to reposition these people in the minds of the public," Berman said. "If you don't, you will always be fighting Mother Teresa. ... We have to marginalize their unwarranted credibility." A Berman front group, the Center for Union Facts, has been running TV ads featuring actors posing as unhappy union workers, and print ads comparing union leaders to Fidel Castro and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.

The U.S. Congress has approved legislation that would provide free public access to all published research funded by the National Institutes of Health, despite a lobbying campaign by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes leading scientific publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society. Earlier this year, AAP hired the PR firm of Dezenhall Resources to campaign against open access. In August, it launched Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), to promote its claim that open access would undermine peer review.

In his classic essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell described political speech as consisting "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Six decades later, several journalism schools are co-sponsoring a conference titled "There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America," to examine "the tactics of disinformation and manipulation diagnosed by Orwell ... along with new propaganda techniques made possible by advances in scientific knowledge and modern technology." A book by the same title has also been released, discussing topics from "the use of deceptively murky jargon, to the emotional pull of phrases like "The War on Terror," to the rise of infotainment and pseudo-science, to the disinclination of big media to provide real news."