And you have how the MSM covered the 2000 election.

The corporate media was for the most part very generous to both Bush and McCain, which is what made it funny when the Bush mudslinging in the primaries occurred: the MSMers were under obvious orders to Always Back Republicans, but the question then was "Which Republican do we back?" Meanwhile, every little thing Al Gore did or didn't do (and even some things that existed only in the minds of RNC spinmeisters and the tame stenographer "journalists" who love them) was Fodder For Scandal.

For more on this (including a recent Dean Reynolds anti-Obama whine that could have been penned by Kit Seelye about Gore back in 2000), go here: http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/573

1) The economy trumps everything else.

2) When the economy stinks, even racists, anti-choicers, and anti-gay folk will give up their pet causes to vote for a black guy who looks and sounds far more competent than his white opponent.

3) Even Republicans hate Bush.

4) McCain votes with Bush most of the time.

5) Sarah Palin, far from saving McCain's butt, turned out to be the final nail in his campaign's coffin as she scares the poo out of even Republicans.

6) The pundits predicting a massive defection of Hillary backers to McCain suffer from recto-cranial inversion.

It'd be interesting to see a similar report of voters' feelings in Fundie and religio-racist right strongholds, mainly to see if they like Palin any better than the folks in Bucks County. But if the rest of the nation is anything like Bucks County, then the Republicans would have to be insane to unite behind Palin for 2012.

The Jerusalem Post will be pissed, but no nukes will be lobbed at Teheran this year:

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1031246.html

But Beagle, she's not afraid to have guests on who might challenge her viewpoint. And she asks tough questions of all her guests, no matter their party.

The really crazed ones won't budge, but the reachable ones are starting to ask themselves the old Reagan chestnut that Obama's recently updated: Are you better off now than you were four WEEKS ago?

Furthermore, nobody is in a mood to tolerate clowning around as a substitute for leadership. We saw that in the debates, when the professional, calm, sharp Obama reassured nervous Americans while the goofballing McCain frightened them. And McCain's two chief tactics have been to a) clown around and b) play the race card.

One can disagree with Obama's decisions and policies, but one can at least see him as a rational being who used a rational process to formulate them. He's someone you can reason with, in other words. McCain comes across as a spoiled brat who went from immaturity to senescence without the usual intervening period of adult responsibility.

Obama's already asked Stiglitz if he wanted to be in Obama's administration. Stiglitz reluctantly declined:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2008/03/02/2003403735

I don't recall the Mark Halperins and Jon Meachams of the world warning, when the GOP took over both houses of Congress in 2002, about the dangers of Bush being able to "go crazy conservative."

This is because they are members in good standing of the GOP/Media Complex, the ultimate triumph of the conservative push, spearheaded by William Simon back in the 1970s, to take over our schools and media. Academia is still holding out, but the media fell over a quarter-century ago, as Mark Hertsgaard's 1988 tome On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency shows in withering detail. (Excerpts can be found here: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.html)

Pitchfork Pat's was one of the first voices to attack Powell in 1995 after Powell proclaimed himself a "Rockefeller Republican" who was out to show that the GOP had room for pro-choice, pro-sanity candidates. The religio-racist right was elated to be able to rally their base by the use the word "liberal" as a code word for "black", much as they're using false accusations of Muslimhood against Obama as a way to say "black man" without actually saying it. They were able to prove Powell wrong in 1995, keeping him off the ticket even though polls showed that the only way the GOP had a shot at the White House in 1996 was with Powell as either the Prez nominee or the running mate.

Buchanan's freaking out now because he knows what Powell's endorsement means: It's Powell's revenge on the religio-racist right for what they've done to him over the years.

This isn't a "funeral". This is the talented-but-mercurial and easily-bored lead guitarist of a once-wildly-popular group announcing the fourth or fifth breakup of the band and saying (yet again) that the band will never reunite, in the hopes of jerking the chains of the band's aging fan base one more time. (See also: Stones, Eagles, Who, etc.)

There are those of us who got sick of the attention-trolling and fan-chain-jerking when it was first done, oh, two decades ago. By this time it's beyond old.