“President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system,” C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb wrote. “Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.”

Some Democratic leaders are in Washington this week to begin the informal discussions over how to combine the two bills. No word yet whether they’ve responded to Lamb’s request.

Update, 3:09 p.m: The Iowa Independent digs up video from a December 2007 campaign stop in Washington, Iowa, in which Obama pledged that all health care reform negotiations  will be televised on C-SPAN.

H/t: The Hill.

Too bad CNN just rejected the ad.

The immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice last week harshly criticized CNN for not mentioning that Dobbs is “one of the biggest menaces facing Latinos in America” because of his relentless focus on illegal immigration, largely from Latin America, as the source of many of America’s ills.

In response, it created this TV ad, with Media Matters, under the headline “CNN: Drop the Hate, Drop Dobbs,” that ends with a plea to viewers to sign the “Drop Dobbs” petition that’s been circulating online and on Twitter and Facebook.

Yesterday, the groups submitted the ad to CNN, asking the network to run it during the “Latinos in America” shows.

Not surprisingly, CNN today rejected the ad. The groups still hope to run the ad during the “Latinos” show on another network, if it can find a willing host.

Fick was about contending that Afghans don’t really care so much about broader Islamic movements. But still: if it’s not so problematic to broadcast television shows about Americans beating the crap out of Muslims in the name of counterterrorism, the Obama administration might as well release those torture photos. Not that Fick thinks that it ought to; this is just a weird, weird anecdote.

Nielsen released its numbers for the top 56 media markets in the country today. These metropolitan areas had the highest inauguration viewership yesterday:

And these had the lowest viewership:

So people who could most easily come see the inauguration in person — those from D.C., Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina — watched from their sofas, while people who live more than 1,000 miles away either made the trek to the capital or didn’t bother to tune in.

Even stranger, the three metropolitan areas at the bottom of this list are arguably the three most liberal in the country: Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.

I suppose it’s possible that people from the D.C. area are simply more politically engaged — much more engaged — than their counterparts from farther afield, but this still strikes me as deeply strange.

Anyone have a better explanation? I await your comments …

[Sen. John] McCain, who trails Barack Obama by an average of 5 percentage points in Colorado polls, this week bought a total of $305,550 worth of ads at KUSA-Channel 9, KCNC-Channel 4 and KMGH-Channel 7, according to records. That is a 46 percent decrease from the week before, and a 56 percent slide from two weeks ago.

For the final eight days of the campaign season, McCain has purchased a little more than $50,000 of ad time at Channel 4 and $67,000 at Channel 9, which is watched by 40 percent of the market. McCain had not purchased ad time for those days at Channel 7 as of Wednesday.

By comparison, Obama has purchased more than $500,000 worth of advertising at Channel 4 and Channel 9 for the final week. Add on the $287,700 he has laid out for ads at Channel 7, and it’s nearly seven times what McCain is spending.

McCain is slated to appear at two rallies in Colorado tomorrow. However, campaign rallies are often scheduled a week or more in advance. With the electoral map seeming to shift on a nearly daily basis, the real measure of whether the campaign thinks it can realistically win the state will be if McCain or Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spend any more of their increasingly valuable time in the state before Nov. 4.

But, as I noted in a previous post, polls indicate that Ohio appears to be slipping away from McCain as well. If McCain loses Ohio and Colorado, it becomes very difficult to imagine a scenario in which McCain can gather the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election.