"Edwards, whose rhetoric is normally perfectly coiffed..."

Coiffed? Usually used in describing hair, as in haircuts!

Good God, you people can never let up, can you?

You can go and live wherever you want, but you can't control it if ten million of your fellow citizens decide to do the same. I live in the Orlando area, and when I moved here 14 years ago I saw "L.A. circa 1950" -- cheap flat land with orange groves and a decent enough climate (at least half the year). Sure enough, the nighttime sounds of frogs and crickets has given way to the drone of vehicles. And here, unlike the Southwest, the ecosystem is naturally in need of huge amounts of rainfall. The porous limestone under us can collapse like a drying sponge, taking houses and roads into the maw of expanding sinkholes.

So, do I feel like packing up and moving to ...Duluth? Egads! People live here and happily endure the six-month sauna of "summer" and the threat of hurricanes and the wonderful home insurance rates they bring because to us, less than sixty degrees feels downright polar! I really don't think I could stand the cold and snow. Call me a wimp. But it's January 6 and 75 degrees outside. The days I have to actually wear something heavier than a short sleeve shirt to go outside are, maybe 15 a year. Wimmmmmp!

But this is a conscious decision to live here, with the understanding that there is no place one can live consequence-free.

Gee whiz! Who put the bee in your bonnet? You sound like George W. Bush circa 2000 describing "pointy-headed intellectuals".

Plus, I would suggest that Hawaii is pretty clearly delineated from space. Most of my Florida too, though not all. But for what it's worth, where is the Michigan-Wisconsin border from space?

something worries me about Obama. He either lacked the intellectual curiosity to find out that Social Security was not in "crisis", or worse, cynically used those words to pander to the right. I don't know which, but I'll for now guess the first. He didn't think too much about really pissing off the gay community by appearing with McClurkin. He argues that his health care plan is best because it contains the one thing - lack of universality - that makes his plan hopeless.

It just keeps cropping up over and over, this tendency to not have done his homework. It worries me because with all the fawning coverage he's getting - look at it, nothing critical at all - we may be in for some serious buyers remorse come 2009.

One of the candidates would finally be pushed too far and say the following: "Obviously this debate is not about us, and clearly it's not about the American public or their future. It is crystal clear that this debate is all about you, Mr. Russert, and your need to aggrandize yourself by making news. And you do this by using your two flavors of question - gotcha! and let's you and him fight. A responsible journalist would ask questions to illuminate, but you ask questions to degrade, and in so doing, grab the spotlight for yourself. Don't you in any way feel the slightest pang of responsibility for contributing to this sewer of fear and hate we've been living with these past seven years?"

Uhhh, I woke up now. Ha! Crazy dreams I get sometimes.

minus the goofy hairdo looks a lot like Robert Novak. Coincidence? Or is it something in Tom Tomorrow's view of the Prince of Darkness?

As far as the three heads of contemporary Republicans go, imagine their necks getting tangled with each other when trying to respond to issues like the right to die (e.g. Terri Schiavo) or immigration or church v. state.

The interesting thing to watch will be McCain's metamorphosis as the general election approaches. Let's work to keep the light of scrutiny on him. (Anybody got the "bomb bomb Iran" video ready?)

I live in a deep deep red part of the largest swing state in the country. And, being a southern white male, I can pass for Republican quite easily. So what do Republicans I meet in the grocery store tell me?

"Obama? He's not so bad" they say, but "I'll do anything to keep *expletive, expletive, expletive* Hillary from getting in!" And this is from the women.

Me personally? Full disclosure: I voted for Edwards, and I still think Edwards would have been the best choice. So I am not awestruck over Obama by any measure. I worry that if he were the nominee he would not be able to respond to the Slime Machine, given that in his biggest electoral contest to date he ran against Alan Keyes. But Senator Clinton elicits utter lunacy from these people, without reason or any common sense whatsoever evident in their behavior.

So the anti-Clinton "she will energize the Republican base" argument is not just Obamaniac spin, it's very real, and not to be dismissed, and it is not symmetric vis-a-vis Obama. Sometimes I see comments from Clinton fans that seem to suggest that the Republican slime attacks that any Democratic nominee would face are just like, or would in some way be equivalent to, the anti-Clinton behavior of the Right. This is not true. These people hate Hillary Clinton with unvarnished over-the-top absolute crazy hate.

For that reason, I think Obama would stand a better chance against McCain and the Swift Boaters than would Clinton.

He describes the nice clean collateral-damage-free strike on two guys with a mortar, because that's the movie he was shown. I would have appreciated at least the recognition by the author that he was being spun.

The other comment that crosses my mind is, can enough money buy a technological fix to a hopelessly flawed policy? What will break first, "Bubba" (presumably replaceable cheaply from the perspective of the insurgency) or our bank account? We're at nearly a trillion and counting.