... or does the very fact that Hillary Clinton willingly associates with a big honcho from Burson-Marstellar automatically taint her?

There's a saying: "When you've done something bad, hire a lawyer. When you've done something really really bad, hire a public relations consultant."

BM is the company that Argentina hired back in the 1970's (1980's?) when a whole awkward PR problem blew up involving hundreds of dissidents simply disappearing. And Union Carbide hired BM to control the spin when its factory leaked poison gas and killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India.

I believe BM was also the consultant hired by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990's to create the Global Climate Coalition, one of those professional doubt organisations that succeeded so long in preventing any serious work from being done on global warming.

I was already a Barack Obama supporter but this just cements my feelings on the matter.

should be required to publish their full names, photographs and home addresses with their posts.

So that when climate change turns out to be, you know, nonexistent, and oil reserves prove to be infinite, and their pronouncements have saved us the trouble of adapting to a change that will never ever come, we can go to their houses and throw bouquets of flowers on their front steps.

Not surprised to see all this discussion. I'll throw in my two cents worth here:

1) Today's polls showing how Obama vs. McCain and Clinton vs. McCain play out aren't a really good way to anticipate what happens. They represent how those contests play out as of today. A more realistic assessment would be "How does Obama do against McCain after campaigning against McCain for four months, instead of having to campaign against Hillary?" Right now, Hillary's advantage against McCain is purely on name recognition.

2) Further to 2), a big difference between Obama and Hillary is that the former pursues a 50-state strategy. He gets out there and organizes and works in any state that he has a reasonable possiblity, not only of winning, but even of significantly reducing the gap. Remember, in the general election, there will be more at stake than just the presidency--the electoral college is winner take all but the House and Senate races are somewhat more representative, where a close race in a given state, especially when turnout is high on one side or the other, can significantly alter the composition of Congress.

The old triangulating Democratic strategy was to concede the red states, take the blues for granted and concentrate on three or four swing states, and unless I'm grossly mistaken that's the camp Hillary comes from and I don't see any reason why she'd change this time around. Obama has been contesting states where the conventional wisdom would have had Hillary winning. In some cases he's won (Wisconsin) and in others he's lost (Ohio) but he's won more than he would have had he said "Oh, that one's going to go to Hillary, let's not bother." (Florida and Michigan don't count because, well, they don't count and it was known early on that they wouldn't count.)

3) I see a classic tortoise-and-hare thing here. There's just such a taking-for-granted about Hillary that makes me queasy. Here she was, expecting to walk into the nomination, and almost certainly expecting to walk into the presidency (i.e. people will be so disgusted with the Republicans by November that they'll have to vote for the Democrat.) Her attitude parallels how she got into the Senate in the first place--as James Howard Kunstler once griped, "What, there wasn't a single person in the entire State of New York qualified to be Senator so they had to parachute Hillary in?" It's symptomatic of someone who has been the darling of her own party for so long that she expects it will be just as easy once she's up against people who don't want a Democrat to win.

But the Republicans--well, they may be flailing and thrashing but one thing they aren't going to do is coast. NOW Hillary is fighting, and it would be nice to have seen that kind of backbone during for instance the runup to the Iraq war or, what the hell, the Iran war.

and I went there with--I won't say an open mind, exactly, but one that was at least ajar. (I haven't read his books, because it's hard to read when your eyes keep rolling and your limbs keep trying to throw it aside in disgust.)

Even I was dumbfounded at how empty of insight his presentation was. It seemed to consist of an endless series of tangentially-relevant personal anecdotes, name-dropping ("I was talking to Hillary Clinton and she said to me, Rich...") crypto-self-help-guru-speak, and other intellectual sawdust.

Florida is so utterly frustrating to me because usually I'm very good at rebutting flawed arguments. But there is such an utter lack of substance here that I don't know where to begin. And so many criticisms come to mind that they get stuck, like the Three Stooges trying to get through a doorway, and nothing comes out.

To call him an overrated, overpaid, vapid celebrity would sort of be an insult to Paris Hilton.

Vice-President Joe Lieberman would now, in all likelihood, be the leading contender for the Democratic nomination just by virtue of being the Veep.

You'd be choosing between Joe and another Republican.