This whole situation reminds me often of a routine on the old Bullwinkle T.V. show:

Bullwinkle: Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!

Rocky: Again? That trick never works.

Bullwinkle: This time for sure!

[pulls out a rhino]

How many times must we listen to these clowns promise us that, this time, for sure!?

Shapiro is right on target with this article. The distressing thing to me is, when one puts this article with the post by Alex Koppleman in WarRoom where Howard Dean suggests a soft deadline of July 1 for the super-delegates to put down their markers, my mind started reeling. More than three more months of this nonsense? Oh . . . My . . . God.

I know that the news industry needs "news" to make money, but this stuff isn't news. And one has to think that the cable blabbermouths will find something else to blather about even in the absence of primary surrogates spewing silliness. Perhaps I am alone on this--though I don't think so, honestly--but can't we make it all stop? Why on Earth can't the super-delegates just make their decisions now, and spare us all the agony? (Hell, I don't even want to wait until after Pennsylvania; I want it over now.)

Well, gotta go; I have to go renew my prescription of anti-depressants.

Um, in what way is July 1 a quick decision?

Just thinking of more than three more months of this nastiness makes me want to take a vacation to, say, Australia.

What I would love to see is one of these "press mavens"--David Brooks, David Broder, Joe Klein, Howard Kurtz, George Stephanopoulos, Howard Feingold; any of them--have to sit down with Glenn or Digby or Josh Marshall or somebody, and answer a few simple questions. Nothing complex.

"What are you basing your statement that "this is what the American people are interested in" on? Do you have polling data to back up your assertion? Or some other objective measure?

"When was the last time you spoke to a cross-section of Americans? Please note that chatting with folks at the next table in the Carnegie Deli in midtown Manhattan doesn't count."

"When was the last time you were out of the city in which you do your work (be it New York or Washington or [rarely] some other big city)? Again, place like Sliver Spring, Alexandria, and anyplace on Long Island don't count." (Hell, "When was the last time you were in a different timezone?")

"Do you wear a lapel pin emblazoned with the name of your employer? If not, why not?"

"When was the last time you held a job that forced you to perform physical activity? Have you ever had to make money for living expenses by laying sod, painting houses, washing dishes, cleaning floors, working the graveyard shift?"

I know; I live in an alternate reality where Media Stars get their arrogant feet held to the fire. So sue me.

Fort Ord was located in one of the most beautiful and potentially expensive locations on the California coast: right spang in the middle of Monterey county, abutting Monterey itself. It doesn't require rocket science to know that land in that area would increase in value rapidly.

And one should not underestimate the value of the water deal; much of the land in that area is reclaimed from sand dunes. How expensive is it to irrigate? Probably very.

It probably gets worse, I'm guessing. Most former military bases have some pretty nasty environmental garbage that needs to be cleaned up. Did Diamond get a deal on that as well? A chunk of Fort Ord now hosts a campus for the California State University system; what happened between Diamond and the state of California on that little deal? Did the taxpayers of California get soaked so that this Diamond guy could pocket a bigger profit?

One also can't help but wonder how an Arizona developer got wind of the deal and got help from an Arizona Senator. It's not like California doesn't have a few developers native to the state, you know.

I don't know the answers, but as a former resident of that area, I know how valuable land around there is. There's more here than meets the eye, I'm guessing.

I dislike thinking that it has come to something like this, but the longer this flag pin/Reverend Wright/personality deconstruction coverage goes on, the more I think that the Left has to engage in oppo research on mainstream media figures.

As Glenn has pointed out, Tim Russert has a reputation as a pugnacious and tough interviewer (although not to high-ranking folks on the Right such as, oh, say, President Bush) who asks a lot of "gotcha" questions. But where are the holes in Russert's cloak of "ordinary tough guy from Buffalo"? What if he asked one of those ridiculous questions at a debate or in an interview, and instead of answering the candidate says, "Say, Tim, I'm just wondering: why aren't you wearing an NBC lapel pin? Aren't you proud of your network?" Or perhaps, "Tim, you purport to 'speak for the people,' but when was the last time you spent a week in Buffalo? Or even a day?"

We know what O'Reilly does when confronted with his hypocrisy: he shuts of their mikes. What if Williams was asked to square his multiple real-estate holdings and expensive cars with his insistence that he is speaking for the "Gate 14 crowd"? What if it was pointed out to Charlie Gibson that only very few "ordinary Americans" care about a rise in the capital gains tax?

I don't think it's going to happen any time soon, but I honestly believe it's the only thing that will stop this parade of hypocritical trivia from the "mainstream media."

"Obviously they would have to"? What is he going to do; hold a gun to the heads of oil executives and say, "No price gouging!"

Any policy that depends on the goodwill of the oil industry is bound for failure.