OPERATION Flintlock has begun. American special forces have been descending on Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal in a joint exercise, expected to last another week or so, to combat Islamist terrorism in the region. It is the latest stage of an evolving partnership between America and much of west Africa.

They should probably be wary about that, given what US Special Forces did to Somalia in the name of “Islamic terrorism”.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.

Here’s the question:

Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?

Firstly, that’s not a question. It’s a statement that has had a question mark stuck to the end. Secondly, YouGov would be out of their mind to publish such a flagrantly misleading question – it would trash their reputation and shut down their main competitive advantage: that they are the only firm posting daily poll results, which has gained them a phenomenal amount of publicity in this cycle. The key to this story is in today’s Guardian, where one of YouGov’s top brass have come out and stated that the question’s not actually from the tracker poll:

Anthony Wells, the YouGov political analyst running the poll over the weekend, said: “We test lots of messages and ask people in different ways to see which are the most effective ways to sell an idea. I cannot say who the client is but this was not part of the work we do for News International.”

The key point there is that YouGov (like every pollster) tests messages for whoever pays them to do so. This is part of their commercial business and is perfectly legitimate; they usually go out to small samples and are designed to see what happens to a generic voting intendion question when it is prefaced with the message in question that is to be tested. Polling firms are commercial businesses and political polls are usually posted at a significant loss; they are done as a form of advertising, to enhance the prestige of the firm doing the polling (especially if the polls turn out to be accurate) and to attract message testing work of exactly this sort. It’s not unreasonable to expect that all three parties are doing it, or have done it in the recent past; the Tories were just deeply unlucky to get caught out. I seem to recall that an episode of the West Wing dealt with this exact scenario.

Why the Tories? Well, whoever wants to test the message is testing the ground for a smear attack on the Lib Dems, and Labour don’t have any money. Another helpful clue is that the Tories have already overtly stated that they are using YouGov for message testing. It doesn’t take a genius to thus ascertain that someone in CCHQ is planning an assault on the Lib Dems’ change credentials. Whether this leak will deter them or not remains to be seen.

Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite.

Actually, you won’t find female empowerment halfway up a pole:

Pole dancing is grim and I don’t see anything empowering about learning it. Even if you say that it’s just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs? And if, as Francisco claims, it’s “not intended to be sexual”, why is it only for women?

h/t Kevan.

There were quite a load of sketchy push-polls from various media outlets after the debate last night which will reflect the bias of their readership – the Sun, the Mail and Sky News all have particularly egregious entries. Happily, three proper polling outfits also took the temperature last night: YouGov, whose daily tracker has been the default for the election thus far, ComRes and Angus Reid. A slightly incredible poll from Populus also appeared in the Times – Populus are a legit outfit but their claim of a 61% Clegg victory just isn’t credible. That Clegg carried the night isn’t really in question but that lead is just a bit too fantastic.

The top-lines are as follows: YouGov has NC51, DC29, GB19. ComRes has NC 46, DC 26, GB 20. Angus Reid has NC48, DC20, GB18. Over the span of the three pollsters that’s probably strong enough to take with a degree of confidence – it’s worth noting that the YouGov panel didn’t allow for respondents to select “Undecided” or “None”, which is why Clegg and Cameron have slightly higher scores (and which suggests that Brown’s 20% is pretty much stable).

Angus Reid has released its table – which is still being updated so you’ll have to excuse me if the numbers have shifted slightly in the interim, although I’m fairly confident that the themes will prove to be static. You’ll immediately see that Clegg has by far the most support from his own party – 81% of Lib Dems got behind their leader, while the Labour faithful backed Brown only 51% of the time. What should really worry Cameron is that he only kept 46% of Tories with him. Conservative panel members were slightly more likely to approve of none of them than Lib Dems or Labourites, but couldn’t match the skepticism of those who went into the debate undecided. Clegg drew over 30% of each of the other major parties’ support, suggesting that any poll bump will be drawn equally from both sources. He also hoovered up over 50% of the independents on the panel.

All in all, 43% said that they would be more likely to vote for Clegg in the aftermath of the debate. The post-debate analysis may push that number up, especially if a dominant media narrative springs up and starts to drive some momentum in the Lib Dem’s direction. The Dems can also probably expect a bit of a funding boost off of the back of this. There’s talk this morning of the Lib Dems having a credible shot at second place; at the moment I think that’s fanciful, but there are still two more debates and plenty of events ‘twixt cup and lip.

The problem is, most climate change deniers are no more coherent than that. And yet it’s infinitely self-perpetuating. The mind boggles.