I know Obama backers go ballistic to hear this, but Howard Dean created a lot of this mess. He insisted that Florida, a state in which the Republican supermajority made it a practical impossibility for the Democrats to go later, go later or lose their vote. Really? The Republicans punished it, but they only took away half of the vote. Why the total kibosh? This is Florida, after all, whose votes didn't count, uh, before. Why shut them out? Why shut out Michigan, the big old rust state, with the auto industry collapsing, was it really worth going to the mat about this? Why? Whose purposes are being served here? Forget the dispute about the dates. How can you justify the voters of Florida and Michigan being dropped? Because if you counted them, Hillary would be ahead in the popular vote? No, even I don't believe that. Dean went a long way to invigorating the state Dems across the country. Good for him. But the primaries slipped out of his control, and it's not pretty.

Plus:McGovern, who created this cockamamie proportional voting system to start with, and then was able to use it to get the nomination. More democratic choice of candidate = victory? I don't think so.

I think the Obama revolution is in fundraising over the internet -- $230 million worth -- but he isn't particularly interested in voting. Or at least, why the anger and vituperation over the votes continuing? Because there's a 2% chance that your guy won't win, at this point?

The internet giveth and the internet taketh. It created a massive opportunity for grassroots enthusiasm, but everybody knows the real story about the Internet: flame wars.

Here's my general theory: the internet creates a massive flow of information. But that is too much pressure on the old "As goes Maine, so goes the Nation," kind of straw hat relic that primaries are as an institution. And no, I don't think the caucus is a really good substitute.

So right now, all the states, empowered by Dean and sickened by Bush, wanted to rush forward towards the next election. The structure that resulted is the one we've got now. Let it happen. The longer it goes on, the longer the Democrats are on center stage, the better. Calm the hell down and stop it with the snark. When's the last time I heard anything positive about Barack... from his followers? What's he want to do? What's his vision?

Prmiaries, in the internet era, are like a floating crap game. Everybody wants to roll the dice and leave a comment in the chat room. Live with it.

you can bet that mobs of people would be saying, "They didn't tell us about 3G! We want our money back!"

I think this prediction is completely obvious. iPhone 2.0 -- with 3rd party applications, Exchange server compatibility, and all the rest -- is coming in June. Look at the front page of apple dot com. The software part, that is. AT&T is building out its high-speed network. There's been low-power chips developed. I think they're going with it.

The Wright thing is, by any measure, a bad thing for the Obama campaign. Here's the thing: no candidate, of whatever party, is ever going to win an election based on the slogan, "God damn America." Obama should be brutal, and throw the brother under the bus. He's already been cold-blooded in certain ways: the selective race-baiting, usually just in time for a primary or caucus where blacks are numerous, by deconstructing Bill's or Hillary's words to solidify the black vote and to get Hillary's negatives up. (Psst, that's called the "old politics," and "negative campaigning."

Another thing to watch is the Sean Bell shooting in New York. Watch how far Obama stays from something like that.

I've really looked for any opportunity to join the Obama campaign, since it seems eventually I'll have to anyway, and Hillary's endorsement of the "gas tax holiday" is the most shameless embrace of a right-wing meme since-- well, since the last Obama speech. But this "expose," the entire Huffington Post except for the wonderful Chris Kelly, and the continual stream of so-called outrages, especially the constructed horrors of "race", really turns me off the enterprise. What we get out of the Obama supporters, and sometimes through his campaign, is nothing but the left-wing version of the politics of personal destruction. Face it, Obama was going nowhere until his supporters unleashed their inner Ken Starrs. They have been the ones to unleash the sexualized Chris-Matthews image of the old Hillary, the controlling b-word who PLANS EVERY MOVE, so therefore anything bad that happens to Obama is her fault. Hmm. If she PLANS EVERY MOVE, DOWN TO HER "SO-CALLED TEARS,' why is she down in the polls? Why doesn't she have friends in MySpace? I think it's because her younger detractors listened to the Starr witchhunt, heard the garbage that Joe Conason so rightly demolished in his book, "The Hunting of the President," and were either too lefty to trust a centrist who got elected twice at all, or too young to spot a witchhunt when they saw it. And who can't spot the lynch mob they're perpetuating.

Hint: after enough time accretes to a politician on the national stage as it is now, there will be a lot of crud attached to them. SOME of it might even have some truth to it, but the majority will be the buzzwords and perceptions attached to a politician who wants what the right wing doesn't. Doesn't mean it's true. Most of it isn't.

None of which is to say you MUST vote Hillary. There are lots of good reasons to prefer Obama, and a lot of good reasons to prefer Hillary. But with all this demonization going on, I haven't heard about the good that Obama wants to do very much recently. Just about how that witch is ruining it all.