New Jersey loses about $8 million in foregone sales taxes from the move, according to the watchdog group New Jersey Policy Perspective, and another $9.6 million in grants and equipment that the network won't give back, according to this article in the Asbury Park Press. Hey, 10 years is long enough, ain't it?

Now, NBC, capitalizing on the return move as well as on plans to expand staff by 1,600, wants more tax breaks from New York City, according to Good Jobs New York.

- Matthew Schuerman

New York City is the tax capital of the world.

Conservatives don't like Eliot Spitzer's nominee for Environmental Conservation Commissioner.

Alan Hevesi wasn't the only state comptroller who had his wife chauffeured by a state employee.

Assembly members are playing basketball against the City Council this weekend.

Hillary Clinton's favorite game is blackjack.

Tom Daschle will endorse Barack Obama.

Jonathan Stein thinks "John McCain might as well be gay."

A GOP pollster tells Greg Sargent that that poll showing massive support for the war in Iraq is bogus.

A Republican presidential debate in Iowa will air on MSNBC on November 6.

And pictured above is a photographic scrum in the Council's Red Room today.

-- Azi Paybarah

O'Donnell made her own point of view clear when she showed footage of Carter, on Hardball, saying that the United States has been deprived (by the lobby) of the vigorous debate about the Occupied Territories that goes on every day in Israel itself. I applaud her for being a tough journalist who knows a smokescreen.

O'Donnell's stance is significant. It demonstrates that, 10 months on, and notwithstanding the inability of the New York Times to cover the matter and the smearing of the authors by the Washington Post, Walt & Mearsheimer have mainstreamed the lobby as an issue in our public life. The battle is on. American attitudes on Israel are changing. More and more Americans recognize a simple truth: the hateful Israeli occupation has undermined our image across the Arab world.

“We had a little song we sang,” said the younger Mr. Abrams, now 40, who in the intervening years has attended law school, earned a living as a television legal correspondent and, as of six months ago, served as the general manager of MSNBC. Dan claimed no memory of most of the words. Floyd remembered it perfectly and happily sang a verse. (The song goes to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”)

“Going to the o-ffice. / Going to the o-ffice. Yes, we are. / Yes, we are. / Daddy will read a bookie. / Daniel will eat a cookie. / Yes, we are.”

The elder Mr. Abrams, 70, is a leading First Amendment attorney and a partner at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel. He said that he raised his two children—Dan and his sister, chief of the general-crimes bureau at the U.S. Attorney’s office Ronnie Abrams, 38—just as he had been raised: “with the air of the law in my own home.” At night, instead of bedtime stories, he told legal morality tales: for example, one about a 19th-century Kentucky schoolteacher who bought coal to heat her classroom and sued the school district after it declined to reimburse her. Earlier in the evenings, he would try out closing arguments on the children.

“There was a time, when Ronnie was around 11, when I used to use her in particular as a sounding board for oral arguments,” said Mr. Abrams père. “I found that she had about the same level of patience as most judges. She would say, ‘What are your cases about?’ She’d listen for a minute or two. She’d ask, ‘What do you say? And what do they say?’ Then she would rule.”

Efrat, Mr. Abrams’ wife—a former Hebrew-school teacher and Guggenheim docent—is the only non-J.D. in the immediate family. (The extended Abramses include some non-lawyers—and Floyd’s first cousin Elliott, President Bush’s deputy national-security advisor, with whom the New York Abramses maintain distant, if not chilly, relations.)

Dinner-table conversations can get wonky. “There are definitely times when my mother feels left out,” said her son.

Mr. Abrams senior grew up in New York, first in the Bronx, then in Queens. His father manufactured artificial flowers; his mother stayed home. He considered becoming an academic, but chose Yale Law School when he realized that he couldn’t satisfy the two-language requirement of the Graduate Record Exams. His children trained as lawyers because what else were they going to become?

Ronnie was bound for the bar at an early age. Dan followed the same track, but spent much of his youth aspiring to be the next Ted Koppel. Not till he had his law degree in hand and a clerkship beckoning, though, did he veer off into television.

“If my dad had been a real legal purist,” said the son, “he would’ve said, ‘Come on—you can’t give up a prestigious clerkship.’ He was very encouraging of my taking a $22,000-a-year job at Court TV.”

While the Abrams lawyers consult each other frequently on legal matters, father and son claim not to have run into any serious conflicts of interest.

“There have been some amusing moments,” said Floyd. The elder Mr. Abrams made a number of television appearances during the 2000 Presidential-election dispute. “I was on Dan’s show when he had a program together with Geraldo, and I was on and Dan was doing the interviewing on it. They had one of these boxes where you have four people on screen at once; it looks like you’re on Hollywood Squares or something. Anyway, he asked the first person for his views, then the second, then the third, then he came to me. I realized he didn’t know what to call me.”

During the first exchange, Dan called his father “Mr. Abrams.”

“Apparently, there was laughter in his ear from his studio,” Floyd Abrams said. “So the next time, he said, ‘Floyd, what do you think about that?’ Apparently, there was louder laughter. The last time he called on me, he said, ‘Well, I now call on the chief justice in our home.’”

We also have no idea which party will control the Senate-- and with the Virginia race now on its way to a recount, it may be several days. The signs, though, point to a reduced Republican majority, with Democrats falling short in Tennessee and Virginia. However, if the Virginia outcome is reversed -- either in the very late returns (13 precincts from Democrat-rich Richmond have apparently not been counted yet) -- and if Democratis then run the table in Missouri and Montana, they'll have their magic six seats.

So for anyone still reading this, the best advise is to head to your living room, flip on MSNBC, keep your finger on the mute button when Chris Matthews comes on the screen, and have some fun watching the rest of the numbers trickle in.

-- Steve Kornacki

-- Steve Kornacki

- Riva Froymovich

Mr. Reynolds’ enthusiasms have proven popular enough to make Instapundit the seventh-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, according to data compiled by the blog-tracking Web site Technorati and published in a recent issue of New York magazine. Among political blogs, only two sites are bigger than his, and both are group efforts: The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s Hollywood gabfest, and DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s left-wing community. Before Instapundit, Mr. Reynolds anonymously fed his amateur-pundit urges by opining, under multiple aliases, in “The Fray,” Slate’s reader forum. Among some journalists (I’m not one), that kind of behavior gets you labeled a crank. But outsource the same thoughts to your vanity Web site and you’re fit to be a guest on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz.

Blogging made Mr. Reynolds famous, at least in the medium-size universe of people—journalists, law professors, and the handful of political and news junkies who aren’t journalists or law professors—who read news-and-politics blogs. It landed him two regular gigs in the mainstream media: a blog at MSNBC.com and a blog at The Guardian’s new group blog, “Comment Is Free …. ” (Yes, he has three blogs.) If Mr. Reynolds deigns to bless a puny, readerless blog with a link from Instapundit, he creates the fabled “Instalanche,” a wave of readers whose traffic can vault a blog from obscurity to the A-list (or at least the B-list.)

So you would think that Mr. Reynolds would devote his new techno-topian manifesto, An Army of Davids, to the wonders of blogging. But he doesn’t. On that subject, Mr. Reynolds is remarkably sedate. The triumphalist tone he strikes on Instapundit turns out to be a bit of a pose. Blogging, Mr. Reynolds tells us, is like brewing your own beer: You do it because it’s fun and because it makes you happy, not because you think you’re going to take down Anheuser Busch.

Mr. Reynolds has bigger things on his mind than blogging, such as explaining how, in the future, everyone is going to live forever on a terraformed Mars, where we’ll all work from Starbucks. (It’s slightly more convincing than it sounds.) The various chapters—including ones on blogging, nanotechnology, aging research and space travel—are supposedly linked by a unifying theme: All of these technologies help the little guy. See, nanotechnology, it’s really small, so it fits. And slowing the aging process, that helps people. And space travel, that involves technology. To the limited extent that this scattershot approach succeeds, it’s because the book resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: cheery, brief, optimistic, opinionated, idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, it more often resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: condescending, slight, triumphalist, data-free, idiosyncratic. The entire book is written in an oblivious, lecturing-to-children tone (“People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things.”)

There’s something to the notion that technology—whether slingshots or Web sites—lets the individual level the battlefield against institutional Goliaths. But Mr. Reynolds doesn’t add any new or surprising thoughts. He thinks it’s novel to point out that we’re moving from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, that the Internet is cutting out the middleman and “disintermediating” many industries, and that technology now gives individuals powers that once belonged only to nation-states.

Mr. Reynolds is also very good at vanquishing straw men. No idea passes through his mind, it seems, without simultaneously conjuring up an army of imaginary skeptics wielding preposterous, easily debunked arguments. In one passage, he imagines how “bluenoses” would scorn his practice of taking his daughter to the Build-a-Bear store at the mall. In another, he fantasizes that members of the media get upset when citizens respond to disasters calmly, and without the need for directions from government officials, “because there’s no one in charge to interview.”

Most of all, Mr. Reynolds also seems wholly unaware of the many ways in which his thesis is invalid. It may be fun to pretend that you’re a rugged online individual fighting The Man of big institutions that keep putting you down. But Instapundit himself draws a paycheck from an institution of a kind that’s been around since the Middle Ages: the university (and his is funded by the state). There are exceptions, but the vast bulk of successful news-and-politics bloggers seem to be tenured professors or prominent journalists. Who are the Davids here?

The original David, the boy-with-slingshot who felled the fearsome Philistine giant, didn’t stay small for long: After the slingshot episode, he rose to become king of the Israelites. And he abused his power, sending a man to his death so that he, David, might sleep with the dead man’s wife. In other words, David eventually became a Goliath. And so has Instapundit, at least in his corner of blogdom—though to my knowledge he has yet to kill anyone.

In the blogosphere, there’s an irritating convention: the use of the phrase “gets it” to mean “agrees with me.” To be honest, I think Glenn Reynolds gets it. I just wish he did more than that. If you don’t believe me, well, read the whole thing.

Chris Suellentrop writes the “Opinionator” column for The New York Times.

Even more quietly, that Web traffic is rescuing the finances of the trailing networks—supplying tens of millions of dollars a month.

For all its struggles in the TV ratings, CNN is still reporting revenue growth. That’s due to money from online advertising, according to CNN.com senior vice president and general manager David Payne.

“You gotta show growth,” Mr. Payne said. “And right now, all that growth is coming out of interactive.”

At MSNBC, the MSNBC.com Web site sometimes earns more in monthly ad revenue than the cable channel does, said Kyoo Kim, the site’s vice president of sales.

On Feb. 3, BusinessWeek reported that MSNBC and CNN have been beating Fox on the Web in Nielsen online ratings.

On Feb. 6, CNN supplied The Observer with its own internal traffic-tracking numbers: According to the site’s data, CNN.com had 1,313,592,095 page views in January 2006.

Nielsen’s Net Tracker records about half that—a discrepancy commonly lamented by Web executives, who are able to monitor exactly how many hits their sites receive. MSNBC, by Nielsen figures, has similar page views to CNN.

Meanwhile, Nielsen credits FoxNews.com with about 200 million page views a month; FoxNews.com head Bert Solivan estimated that the actual figure is more than double that. That would put the Web leaders ahead of Fox by not quite a billion page views apiece.

Those numbers translate into money. Though the networks won’t discuss figures for online advertising revenue, it’s possible to make some estimates—based on how much they charge for ads and how many times the ads are seen.

CNN.com charges between $9 and $30 for 1,000 page views of a display ad. (For comparison’s sake, a 30-second spot during Anderson Cooper 360 costs around $10,000, according to one television buyer. That means an advertiser would pay around $16 to reach 1,000 viewers.)

Assuming the cheapest rate, $9, and assuming a single ad per page, the site would make $12 million per month, at the very minimum.

In truth, CNN.com often has at least two display ads per page, and sometimes the whole thing is sponsored by a single company. On Feb. 6, for example, AT&T owned every ad on the home page.

Other intangibles muddy the algorithm: discounts given advertisers, graduated rates for targeting specific audiences (sports fans, for example) and click-through ads, which pay only when a viewer chooses to click on them.

Nevertheless, given the ad density and the prices, it’s safe to guess that display ads alone make tens of millions of dollars for CNN.com and MSNBC.com each month.

And that doesn’t include the priciest part of Web advertising: video ads. Last month, users watched 26,862,029 clips on CNN.com, according to the network. At prices between $35 and $45 per thousand views, the 10-second ad spots attached to each clip would have brought in an additional million dollars, at least, for the network.

All of this makes up a growing share of the networks’ total yearly revenue. In 2005, CNN grossed $794 million in revenue. Fox made $574 million; MSNBC made $258 million.

“The data is pretty clear,” said Mr. Payne. “The broadcast-news ratings chart just drops and drops and drops. For cable, it’s probably less dramatic, but it’s still true. There’s just no doubt in my mind that online usage is going to dominate in the future. Whether that’s 20 years from now or five years from now, I don’t know. But it’s going to win in the end.”

In 1976’s Network, Faye Dunaway lusted after a 20 rating and a 30 share. In a contemporary remake—not necessarily the CBS one that George Clooney has in the works—that character would get just as hot for a 30 percent net penetration and a 30 percent audience growth rate. That is what MSNBC.com had last quarter, according to an independent study by Jupiter Research. CNN.com had around a 25 percent penetration, which means it reaches about a quarter of the online news audience, and a growth rate around 10 percent. Fox was the reverse: a penetration under 10 percent but a growth rate of 25 percent.

“We’re going to be ramping up pretty dramatically over the course of the year,” said Bert Solivan, the general manager of FoxNews.com. Fox is on par with the other networks in terms of the time each visitor spends on its site—a key factor in determining ad rates—but the network came late to the Internet, and without a portal (like MSN.com) to funnel viewers to the site, has struggled to catch up.

“News Corp. is really pushing heavy in the Internet space, with [Rupert] Murdoch making a big push online,” Mr. Solivan said. “Part and parcel of that is obviously the expansion of FoxNews.com. What we’re doing is, we’re building the technical and production infrastructure, and we’re expanding content across the board.”

So who are the people visiting these sites? From a marketing point of view, they’re an attractive target.

For one thing, they are overwhelmingly employed. Almost all Web traffic for news sites comes between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., from people who are theoretically being paid to do something other than surf the Internet for news about Brangelina’s baby or the latest lunatic pronouncement from the president of Iran. They are slightly more male than female. They are well educated, and they probably make more than $75,000 a year. And no matter what they see during the day online, many will still go home and watch television at night.

“The amount of time people are spending on news sites is still not what they’re spending watching TV,” said Charlie Tillinghast, the president and publisher of MSNBC.com. “They’ve really just added the Internet to their media consumption. I guess they’re spending less time socializing or something. But eventually—there’s only so many hours in the day—eventually people are going to have to shift a little bit.”

Advertisers, for their part, have been slow to pick up on the trend. According to the Online Publishers Association, only 6 percent of media advertising dollars are spent online, while more than 40 percent are spent on television commercials and about 30 percent on newspaper ads. But about 34 percent of people listed the Internet as their primary source of news, higher than television (32 percent), radio (20 percent) or newspapers (8 percent).

Sensing the shift, networks have begun pouring money into their online operations, expanding the staff, double-tasking television correspondents with also filing for the Web, and outfitting giant newsrooms in anticipation of a bigger shift. CNN.com is the only fully high-definition-equipped newsroom at CNN.

The size of these operations is difficult to tally, because the Web sites are joint ventures involving many parts of vast media conglomerates, with staffs that are partly shared with other divisions. CNN.com has 250-odd full-time staffers and twice that number spread throughout CNN’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting, according to Mr. Payne. MSNBC.com has about 175 employees devoted exclusively to the site—spread among offices in Redmond, New York, London and Washington—and many others spread among the news divisions of NBC Universal, said Mr. Tillinghast. By the end of the year, Mr. Solivan estimated, FoxNews.com would have 100 full-time personnel.

The broadcast networks have also entered the competition, with Web sites that are updated 24 hours a day. In January, ABC News launched a 3 p.m. webcast of World News Tonight. In July 2005, CBS relaunched CBSNews.com, the brainchild of former News president Andrew Heyward and online director Larry Kramer, which allowed visitors to create their own webcasts, using segments from the evening news and pieces produced specially for the Web.

“We’re in full-growth mode,” said Mike Sims, the director of news and operations for CBSNews.com. “There are so many opportunities here, and it’s really just beginning. Between Internet and wireless and everything else that’s out there, it’s just going to take a few years to let some of the newer technology settle in. But it’s wide open.”

"Doesn’t Brokaw look a little sauced tonight?”

Thus spoke Dick Cavett, rather loudly, at 10 p.m. on Feb. 2, right into NYTV’s ear. It was three hours into the Museum of Television and Radio’s 2006 Gala Evening, which was held at epic length in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria and M.C.’d by Tom Brokaw, former anchor of the NBC Nightly News. Mr. Cavett, resplendent in a snug-fitting tuxedo and spit-shined wingtips, sat in the back of the room, at table 76.

Dinner was lox spirals and filet mignon. He didn’t touch it. By hour two of the five-hour event, the beloved former talk-show host was providing his own supplemental commentary, in an exaggerated stage whisper, while the official program celebrated NBC Universal chairman Bob Wright (“When can we get the hell out of here?”) and Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels (“What, I’m supposed to stand for a Canadian?”).

Sensing the Brokaw observation had traction, Mr. Cavett turned and repeated it to someone else:

“Doesn’t he sound a little oiled-up to you?”

Oiled or not—which is to say not—Mr. Brokaw carried off the affair with grace. These ceremonies tend to land a little softly, more an excuse to give fat-check writers a chance to preen (“Hi, I’m Jeffrey Gould …. No, not in television …. Yes … you got me … a donor … ”), than any moment of real distinction. Somewhere along the line, someone deserving gets a hunk of crystal— why now, no one’s exactly sure. A highlight reel rolls. There is the family, in a canoe. Then the extensive philanthropic work. Now CBS president Leslie Moonves, saying something nice.

Mr. Brokaw told a few jokes: “I used to get juiced up at 5:30 every night. I’d go up to the NBC cafeteria, and I’d make out with Tina Fey for about 15 minutes.” Ms. Fey, Darrell Hammond and Barbara Walters took their own turns. At one point, Conan O’Brien appeared onstage to do some shtick, telling Mr. Brokaw, “It was nice of you to take time out of your not-busy schedule,” and cannily noting NBC’s poor performance in prime time.

“It was Bob who graciously supported the decision for me to take over The Tonight Show, just 18 years from now,” Mr. O’Brien said. “For those of you who live to see it, it’s gonna be a doozy.”

By a rough estimate, that could be about half the crowd.

The other half, industry veterans pleased with the opportunity to schmooze, sipped cocktails and smiled politely through the speechifying. At one point, Pat Mitchell from the museum gave a stirring talk about the future of television. Mr. Cavett leaned in and whisper-shouted: “Have you heard any rumors about what she’s saying?”

In the lobby, former “Weekend Update” anchor Jimmy Fallon was seen talking with an unidentified woman. “You look great,” the woman said, nodding in the direction of Mr. Fallon’s now-platinum streaked hair, which he claimed to have done for a movie. “I look like an asshole,” he replied.

Meanwhile, the current cast of Saturday Night Live was spread out among tables in the center of the room. Court TV chairman Henry Schleiff and CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer looped around the room saying hello, each as if racing through some invisible obstacle course. At one point, Mr. Cramer smacked NYTV in the shoulder and said we would be an idiot not to attend a taping of his show the following day. Maria Bartiromo snuck out while Mr. Michaels was receiving his standing ovation.

Back at table 76, all was well. Hour five came, and Mr. Cavett sipped daintily on a cup of black coffee. Would he be speaking in any official capacity as part of the evening’s program?

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But there’s always a possibility with these things.”

He's planning to spend about $500,000 over the last two weeks on these networks: Comedy Central, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, TNT, YES (including 11 Yankees games), and USA.

The buy also includes Lifetime, a regular stop for pols, and -- for some reason -- Nickelodeon!