Pressed for time today, I intend only to update a topic. This week, some readers got angry when I observed in my Sunday print column that Fox News "has fanned so many false rumors." How dare I suggest such a thing, they said. They challenged me to name even one example.

Most of these readers appear to hail from the great state of Montana (thank you, Billings Gazette), so perhaps there is something in the local water that makes them oblivious to the obvious. Their challenge was not exactly a brain-teaser, being roughly equivalent to the addition of two plus two.

There was the false rumor that President Obama was foreign-born, the false rumor that health reform would create "death panels," the false rumor that Obama would create internment camps run by FEMA, the false rumor that he is trying to conduct Mao-style indoctrination of schoolchildren, the false rumor that he was Muslim and/or perhaps a terrorist fellow traveler (remember the "terrorist fist jab?"), the false rumor that the symbol on the back of the dime was a fascist plot hatched by Democrats in 1916...that sort of thing.

And then, just yesterday, another false rumor surfaced.

Along the faux information pipeline (conservative blogs, websites, video aggregates, the usual) word quickly spread that Obama had refused to watch the Tuesday night election returns, preferring instead to switch on HBO and behold himself in the new HBO documentary depicting his '08 campaign.

»  More Anatomy of a falsity

Before I undoubtedly extract profound meaning from last night's odd-year election results - and naturally I'll try to do so - I feel it first would be wise to acknowledge the limitations of this ritual exercise. Let's face it, most political commentators are congenitally conditioned to overanalyze the tea leaves.

For instance, in November 2001, the Democrats won resounding victories in both the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races. This happened during the first year of the George W. Bush presidency - and just seven weeks after 9/11, when Bush's popularity was in the stratosphere. So commentators naturally concluded that those twin Democratic victories, achieved despite Bush's political strength, surely had to be a sign that the Democrats would kick butt in the 2002 congressional elections. And yet, in the end, quite the opposite occurred.

But we scribes often can't resist the impulse to divine slippery truths. Indeed, on the eve of these '09 elections, readers were often warned about this. On Monday, The Associated Press cautioned that "the outcomes won’t predict next year’s midterm results.” But then the AP proceeded to predict that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race "will be a key measure of how America feels and, perhaps more importantly, how independent voters are acting ahead of the 2010 elections.”

Why do we engage in this practice? Because, as the Columbia Journalism Review shrewdly noted on Monday, "it just makes politics more fun. Much as sports fans create extra meaning for games by seeing every choke or victory in moral terms, political journalists make elections more meaningful by threading them into a broader narrative....The political junkies who read these stories, of course, have all the same incentives to divine broader meaning." (OK, so it's your fault, too.)

So there you have it. And now we can proceed. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are all kinds of unknown unknowns embedded in last night's results, and I will leave those alone. What follows are only what I can vouch for as the known knowns.

»  More Known knowns on the morning after

As we prepare for tonight's voting results in the '09 trifecta - the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races (where Democrats are hoping to hang onto the Garden State), plus the special House election in upstate New York (which has

become a conservative

) - let us not overlook the gay marriage referendum in Maine, where the movement for equality can ill afford a defeat.

Earlier this year, the Maine legislature passed - and the Democratic governor subsequently signed - a bill legalizing such bonds, thus making Maine the fifth state in New England to extend marriage equality to all. That signing should have been settled the matter, but no. Gay marriage foes quickly amassed enough petition signatures to put the law on a state referendum ballot. So here we are today, and all available polling evidence suggests that the vote will be close.

In the past, when courts have ruled in favor of gay marriage, cultural conservatives have generally insisted that such momentous decisions should be made not by judges, but by legislators representing the people. But now that Maine's legislators have done that very thing, the gay marriage foes naturally won't accept that either. Hey, that's politics; you fight by employing all available means. And since Maine does allow its people to nix a state law via referendum, it's natural that the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage, and an advertising team from California, would hook up with Maine's Roman Catholic Diocese to go that route.

»  More "Maine ways" and gay marriage

Harry Truman could’ve taught Barack Obama a thing or two about how to deal with a hostile press - basically, by ignoring it.

Obama's core argument, in support of his newly declared war against Fox News, is that the cable channel is biased, unfair, and fraudulently branded. In the words of a top Obama aide, Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news," and therefore the White House has no choice but to lash out in response.

This is where Obama might be wise to heed Harry. This is where a little historical perspective would be valuable, if only to refute the assumption (which is endemic in our amnesiac culture) that the past has nothing to teach us, that current events have no antecedents.

The Obama team is right to describe Fox as opinion journalism masquerading as news (and the public agrees; according to a new Pew Research Center poll, Americans perceive Fox News to be the most ideological TV news channel). But so what if it is? Sixty years ago, Truman was consistently harassed by a faux news operation that was far more dominant in its day than Fox News could ever hope to be - yet he took the hits without complaint, knowing full well that when you scrap with a skunk, you can wind up just as odorous.

»  More Fox News, circa 1950

Happy Halloween eve, on so many fronts:

Perhaps the House Democrats have merely been masquerading as paragons of integrity. Nancy Pelosi led them to power in 2006 by painting the GOP as a cesspool of corruption, but an unpleasant smell now seems to be emanating from her own camp. I need not mention Charlie Rangel, who has enriched himself financially in all sorts of creative ways (and who continues to enjoy Pelosi's protection), because I have already detailed his behavior. More urgent, this morning, is a news report about various other House Democrats who are now being targeted in ethics probes. Five of them (including John Murtha of Pennsylvania) are suspected of arranging lavish federal earmarks for military contractors in exchange for lavish campaign contributions. Another is suspected of helping to steer federal bucks to a bank in which her husband owned at least $250,000 in stock. Another is suspected of failing to list certain property and income on congressional disclosure forms, most notably a house that might have received improper benefits. Everybody is naturally claiming innocence, but if the smell of impropriety gets worse, House Democrats could pay a price in the '10 elections. A few of the targeted lawmakers are Republicans, but when corruption becomes an election issue, the incumbent party tends to suffer.

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Senate Republicans have been donning their fright masks and trying to scare Americans with the notion that a government-run health insurance option would usher in socialism or wreck the economy or make people die sooner or whatever. But I bet they're the ones who are scared, for political reasons. The Senate Democratic bill proposes creating a national public option that would also allow recalcitrant states to say no and "opt out" - a scenario that would be a political nightmare for the GOP. It's fine and dandy for Republicans to rail in the abstract against "big government," but it would be fascinating - say, five years from now - to see whether a red-state Republican governor and his Republican legislature would actually dare to "opt out," thereby denying to their citizens the same government-run insurance option that was freely available across the state border. Right-wing rhetoric works fine, until it collides with the real needs of real people. Which is why so many Republicans are grabbing that economic stimulus money for the folks back home.

»  More Friday frights

It's one thing to hear a liberal politician or commentator make the case for a reduced American military footprint in Afghanistan; one would expect such a messenger to proffer that message. It's another thing entirely to hear the same arguments from a former Marine Corps captain, somebody who survived combat in Iraq to become a respected Foreign Service officer and a senior U.S. advisor in Afghanistan.

Actually, Mattthew Hoh is no longer on the job. He quit on Sept. 10, telling the State Department in his four-page resignation letter (which surfaced publicly this week) that the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan is a counterproductive mistake, that our continued - and potentially enhanced - military presence is merely fueling the insurgency that we are seeking to extinguish, wasting more American lives and money in the process.

In his written words, "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan...(Grieving American families) must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

He says the insurgency is actually comprised of hundreds of localized groups that care little about the Taliban or al Qaeda; rather, they care mostly about fighting the American occupier - which, in turn, is perceived as propping up the corrupt Karzai regime. As Hoh writes, "the Afghan government's failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastic..."  

»  More "I have lost confidence"

There's something about Joe Lieberman that always prompts me to conjure The Godfather. Perhaps because he is so clearly the Carlo Rizzi of the Democratic party.

But here's the thing: What if Carlo Rizzi had indeed conspired with the Barzini family to turn Sonny Corleone into Swiss cheese at the toolboth, and Sonny's brother Michael had indeed unearthed Carlo's treachery...only to cut Carlo a break and allow him to fly off to Vegas for a new life of sun and fun and further treachery? Wouldn't we have ridiculed Michael as a naive softy if he had spared Carlo the shock of sudden death by strangulation? If he had told Carlo, "there's a car waiting to take you to the airport"...and he had meant it?

Yet that's how the Senate Democrats dealt last November with Lieberman's treachery. The allegedly Democratic-leaning independent had just returned from a grand campaign '08 adventure in which he had clearly crossed the line. Not only had he stumped for the Republican presidential candidate, but he had suggested on national television that Barack Obama might be a Marxist; that Obama wanted to practice "what used to be known as socialist theory"; that Obama favored "retreat in defeat from the field of battle." Lieberman had set up Obama for a hit, the hit had failed...yet there he was, in the weeks after the election, telling the Senate Democrats that he wanted to caucus with them in 2009. And not only did he want to caucus with them, he also felt he deserved to keep his chairmanship of the prestigious Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

We know, of course, what the Democrats decided to do: Nothing. Carlo/Joe got to keep his perks and his seniority. Obama was in a conciliatory mood, hoping to change the tone in Washington and all that, and he sent word not to touch the guy. Chris Dodd, Joe's Connecticut compadre, inadvertently did his own Godfather number when he told the Senate Democrats that Joe was "willing to be a member of your family." Joe himself promised Democrats that if they spared him, they would "not regret" their decision. The expectation was that even if Joe continued to vote like a hawk on foreign policy, he would at least hew to his Democratic roots and support the majority caucus on the big-ticket domestic issues. Such as health care.

»  More The Carlo Rizzi of the Democratic party

The temptation today is to focus on Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's Monday decision to endorse a government-run health insurance option, and to point out that after 60 years of stalemate, we are now much farther along the road toward substantive health care reform than ever before - a vivid reminder that transformative progress in America often seems like an impossible dream, until it happens.

But never mind the latest twist in the health care story; I'd rather riff a bit on this broader theme of progress. It came to mind last night as I listened to New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who was in town to talk up her new book about "the amazing journey of American women" since 1960. (Disclosure: Collins and I worked together in the late '70s.) It's easy to forget how much has changed for women - in the national political realm alone - since the Mad Men era and JFK's New Frontier. It's hard to even conjure how profoundly different those days were, and yet they occurred well within the lifetimes of millions of Americans alive today.

In a span of 50 years - a blip in the life of a nation - "all the presuppositions about gender have been smashed," as Collins put it, during her talk at the National Constitution Center. "It knocks me out whenever I think about it...We've done amazing things in a tiny, tiny piece of time."

On Capitol Hill today, 17 percent of the House and Senate lawmakers are women. (The tally is 17 female senators and 75 congresswomen.) Those stats don't seem very high, given the fact that more than half the voters in any national election are women and that more than half the population is female. But, as Collins' book ably demonstrates, things were a lot worse even in the early '70s - when there were zero female senators and as few as 13 female congresswomen (which translates to 2.4 percent). Plus zero female Cabinet members, and zero U.S. Supreme Court justices.

»  More Progress in the span of a lifetime

On paper, the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York, way up near the Canadian border, is solid Republican territory - so solid, in fact, that this particular hunting and fishing region hasn't elected a Democratic congressman since the era immediately preceding the invention of the telephone. That would be circa 1869.

So one might reasonably assume that on Nov. 3, in a special election to fill the recently vacated House seat, that the Republican party's official nominee will win handily and life will go on as normal. Dede Scozzafava is a member of the state legislature with roots in the district, a seasoned pol endorsed by Republicans as disparate as moderate Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich - therefore, case closed.

But no. Never underestimate the contemporary Republican propensity for circular firing squads.

The GOP's conservative wing, incensed that Scozzafava harbors tolerant views about abortion and gay marriage, appears determined to bring her down in the name of ideological purity. Big-name conservatives - Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, and many more - have defected to a rookie third-party candidate, an accountant named Doug Hoffman, who is running on New York's Conservative Party line. With eight days left on the campaign calendar, every poll reports that this fundamental Republican fissure is splitting the non-Democratic vote and making it highly likely that the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, will capture the seat that he normally would never win.

»  More Purity versus diversity