Clinton has had several raffles in this campaign season. There were one or more to watch debates with Bill, some with Chelsea, and other things in the last few months.

This is a minor incident, but must everything be spun to make Obama look like some kind of a trailblazer? This is really ridiculous.

Alex,

Thank you for pointing out that the president swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not the American people. I have been yelling at my TV for years whenever Bush says this - and he says it a lot - and I have never seen even one journalist or politician correct it. If they did, maybe viewers would think a little more about the price of freedom and the meaning of our Constitution and would not be so quick to give away our freedom for the temporary illusuion of safety.

This is exactly the Obama message - does not sound so inspirational coming from somebody else, does it? A little easier to see the lunacy of it, especially right after Bush's speech. The failures of our government - the war, the economy, failing infrastructure, the erosion of the Constitution - did not happen because Democrats are not being conciliatory enough to Republicans. Just the opposite.

These are Democratic primaries. His success so far shows that he can win white Democratic votes. If that was ever in doubt, we sure are not the party we thought we were.

Only the general election will show if he can win white votes across the board in a country that is still very racist in my view. The Republicans have used the Southern Strategy to great effect in recent elections - we'll see if it still works. This is the best chance to test it, since their field of candidates is so weak and their president so unpopular.

I was an early adopter of both the Frankin eBook, and then the Rocket eBook, and lost interest when content became too hard to get. The design of the Rocket eBook is much nicer than what I see of the Kindle. The Rocket screen is backlit, so I can read it in the dark when staying at people's houses with no reading lamp in the guest room, or when camping. It had a soft keypad and stylus, not that big bulky keypad that takes away from the look and feel of a book. I loved it for travelling. The ability to carry more than a couple of books with me for long trips was what made it worth the price for me. I still prefer having actual books in the house though, so I never got in the habit of using the eBook exclusively. If the Kindle had a nicer design, Amazon's ability to provice content might tempt me back into the water. What if Amazon and Apple had joined forces, and Apple had designed the hardware and user interface to be used with Amazon's content? I would have probably bought one by now.

I would love to see her say, in the debate tonight, with appropriate tough attitude:

I saw one of Sen. McCains' supporters called me a b****. Very insulting - for future reference, that's SENATOR b****!!!

All iPhone users are not complaining about this. I'm sure I am not the only one who has chosen not to hack my iPhone for this very reason. Apple has a contractual obligation to ATT to do whatever they can to prevent hacking, just as they have an obligation to honor their contracts with music companies to limit the distribution of music sold on iTunes. We have no way of knowing the penalites Apple would face if they did not live up to these obligations. Is Apple supposed to risk the whole business to satisfy hackers? That would be absurd.

Anyone with any software experience knows that changes made 'off the reservation' with no configuration management run the risk of being incompatable with future officially released changes. Even if they wanted to Apple could not coordinate their firmware changes with those of the widespread hacker community.

Just to make it clear, Camp Cupcake is the nickname bestowed on the base by the Marines themselves to denote its nature as a cushy, safe place to be. Just the place for these types to go and then be able to say 'I went to Iraq'. Jonah Goldberg would love it.

I suggest calling the fake-machos 'Cupcakes', in honor of Camp Cupcake, the base Bush visited on Labor Day.

I read Drum's post, in which he also included a little walk down memory lane to remind us what was going on in the pre-911 days of the Bush presidency. He did not mention the big story in the news at that time, the California energy crisis, followed closely by the Enron meltdown. I think you are excactly right to link these two things to Cheney's secrecy, whether or not there was anything sinister going on at the energy task force meetings.