I love Walter Shapiro's work, but in this particular article, he's allowing his past experience a little too much weight in coloring his current preference. He writes, "After [the weekly distribution of primaries], the primaries would slowly unfold from March till June, giving voters a chance to deliberate seriously over their choice."

I lived in California for 25 years, and the one thing we never got in California was a "chance to deliberate." What we got, with our June primary, was a chance to say "me too!" for the annointed candidate by the time the primaries finally rolled around to us. It was never less than galling that New Hampshire--a state I quite like, and where I have a number of relatives, but one that is hardly a cross-section of America, nor particularly populous--could weed out several candidates, while California, with it's 40+ electoral votes, got bupkiss. (What do you reckon the odds are that California would have gone heavily for, say, Dukakis in '88?)

This front-loading business is absurd, of course. But it is merely an absurd solution to an absurd problem: that candidates spend more time in a tiny state like New Hampshire than they do in (let's face it) every state west of the Mississippi. If Granite Staters weren't so durn stubborn, these kind of silly solutions wouldn't even be proposed.

(And as for those who complain that New Hampshire would lose one of it's few bargaining chips in national politics I say, "Tough." You had that chip for a long time; someone else's turn now.)

I realize the Mr. Novak has somehow--and inexplicably, it seems to me--attained the aura of a media eminent grise for the Washington press corps. Personally, I find this boggling. Novak's naked partisanship; his ducking, dodging and weaving when people try to pin him down on this (and other) stories; his complete willingness to spill to the grand jury with (seemingly) no objections; his high-handed and easily affronted attitude when his information or motives are questioned; and most of all, the fact that his story continues to evolve and change as more facts come out, makes me wonder why anyone listens to the man. Further, I am baffled by the press' seemingly-complete unwillingness to subject Mr. Novak to the same kind of interrogation that they gave to, say, Clinton over Monica Lewinsky.

If it comes down to a "he said, he said," and one of the "he's" is Novak, I find it hard to believe at this point in the Plame story that anyone would be willing to give Novak the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that has been confusing me ever since two separate bills hit congress about the torture and detention issues: how can you "compromise" on basic Geneva Convention rights? They are very clear, and you are either for them, or against them. The Bush Administration has made it very clear that they find those Conventions "quaint," and are against them.

Which brings us to Congress and their "compromise" bill. On what is there to compromise? If you're against Bush's bill, you're for Geneva. Or so it would look. Apparently I'm just a naive bumpkin.

I had always been under the impression that it was Republicans, not Democrats, who believed in moral absolutism, and despised moral relativism. But if they are "compromising" on the Geneva Conventions, how on Earth do they justify that? (The quick answer is, of course, that they don't.)

I read National Review's "The Corner" fairly regularly, and of all the posters there, it is clear that Kathryn Jean Lopez not only ingested the Bush Kool-Aid, but that she has a glass every morning with her breakfast. Bush and the Bush Administration can Do No Wrong in her eyes, and she is not nakedly partisan; she is nakedly Bushian. I seriously believe that if Bush were to repudiate the Republican party and become a Democrat, Lopez would be right there rationalizing why it was a good move, and why his values have been Democratic values all along.

It is therefore only a matter of amusement that Lopez is providing guidelines on how the Democrats should or should not use items that are damaging to either Bush or the Republicans. There are people who try to be objective, then there are people we know are *not* objective, and then there are people like Lopez, who couldn't be objective if their lives depended on it. Ignoring her point of view is probably the best path.