and you can cast Obama, Edwards, and/or Kucinich as Gene McCarthy, depending on your preference.

If I had been able to vote in a Democratic primary in 1968, I would have had to acknowledge the superiority of Humphrey's track record as a liberal warhorse and a legislator. But I would have regretted not voting for McCarthy (or for RFK, before his assassination) for the rest of my life.

The soul of the Democratic Party left its body when Humphrey was nominated, and has yet to fully return. Democrats should vote their hearts this year, wherever that leads. You have to have faith in your ideals, or what's the point?

If I lived in a state that was permitted to have a meaningful part in the presidential selection process, I'd probably vote for Obama in the primary, and I still will, if he's still in the running when our primary finally comes up. This is as much because I want this to be a country where a person with this youth, intellect, eloquence, and freshness can become president as it is due to any discernible differences I can find between his stands on the issues and those of the rest of the Democratic field. Then I'll vote for whomever the party's nominee is, because whatever my ideal nominee I don't want to live in the rapidly approaching Dystopia the Republicans have planned for us. To quote Voltaire, "The better is the enemy of the good."

or would it have been BIG news a few weeks ago if Obama had come within three percentage points of Clinton in New Hampshire?

And am I the only one (besides Jon Stewart) who heard very little more than a slight catch in Sen. Clinton's voice, and did not see the "tears" that everyone else seems to have seen coursing down her cheeks? She had a shaky moment and then recovered her composure almost instantaneously.

Let's be fair to both candidates. These two items strike me as evidence that the Democratic tendency toward self-immolation is alive and well. This is much enabled by media narratives, of course: Hillary is a cry-baby, and besides, the tears were fake; Obama suffered a crushing defeat in New Hampshire, since his upset victory in Iowa raised expectations for New Hampshire so high that even a very strong second there was too little.

The double standard that the MSM uses to condemn Democrats will do the job quite efficiently this year, thank you very much, without Democrats themselves helping it along.

Fox News would provide wall-to-wall coverage of this crime, the way they do for blonde teenage girls who are kidnapped/killed. The truth is that a truly free country would find the deaths by violence of inner-city black men and suburban white teenagers (and anyone else) intolerable.

Joan's story is sad proof that whatever the Republican Party thinks, San Francisco *is* part of the "real America," unfortunately.

in which Eco pretty much sums up the supreme silliness (and narcissism) of the sorts of cults and mystery/conspiracy mongering that Booth seems to traffic in. The most wearisome aspect of such cults is the one that Ms. Miller lists under points 1 and 3, i.e. the belief that the entire universe is more or less an emanation of the human mind. Such ideas thrive in a vacuum of historical and scientific literacy. It doesn't hurt that clear writing and clear thinking are not valued commodities in today's public square.

damaged in Katrina, and use the rest to pay down the Visa.

Read the McCain profile in a recent New Yorker, and decide (in conjunction with this incident) if John McCain is anything but a bully, despite all of his verbal abuse being him "just kidding." He's a bully of a different type than the George W. model, who's more the class wiseass (who feels safe to hurl insults and screw up endlessly because his dad is the football coach, or the principal) than a real bully, but a bully nonetheless. Remember the crowd of dim loser hangers-on that would form every schoolyard bully's entourage? That's the press corps, in a nutshell.

Let's not forget that the complicity of Congress (and indeed the complacency of the American people) was necessary to enable Bush to rack up this debt. And the guardians of the supposedly self-correcting market did nothing to discourage it either. George W. Bush is the creation of our collective stupidity and delusion in a way that not even Richard Nixon was. To borrow from the film Forbidden Planet, he is a Monster from the Id of the American people.

It's gotten to the point that shills like Gibson and Stephanopoulos get their talking points from Mallard Fillmore.

Actually, Obama has raised a great deal of his money à la Howard Dean -- over the Internet in small amounts from a very wide base of donors. I send him $25 every few paydays, since that's the only way I can possibly influence the presidential election, given the fact that I'm a liberal in a deep red state.

The ultimate importance of this new, non-John Houseman method of financing a campaign has yet to be determined. For now, given the Electoral College and the gerrymandered status of our Congress, it's the closest thing to being able to really influence federal electoral politics we have.

This is another reason I prefer Obama to Clinton: while both have big donors, they set the tone of the latter's campaign and would ultimately set the agenda of her presidency. Obama, not so much.