Howard Kurtz, from Sunday’s “Reliable Sources”:

So you all seem to be acknowledging without quite saying it that there is something to the notion that Hillary Clinton has not been treated with exactly the greatest respect by the press. And let’s face it, I mean, there have been many times in this campaign — not in the last few weeks during the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy, for example — when, you know, to use one example of it, when journalists said, as Chris Matthews once did, that they’ve got to throw up their leg when Barack Obama speaks.

We hope journalists really aren’t vomiting their appendages. We hope we won’t soon see arms getting thrown up, as well. Gag me with a spoon, indeed.
Let’s simply assume this is what Kurtz was talking about …

Forgive us for being late to this news, and please further forgive us if this punchline has already been done, but we just saw this…

… and we couldn’t be happier about this:

Yes, in this election, the steaks are high.

Nice opening to this post in The Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp:

House Republican Leader John Boehner stepped to John McCain’s defense late Thursday night, comparing Barack Obama to former President Jimmy Carter, a high insult to many American voters who remember long gas lines, double-digit inflation, talk of a national malaise and the failed rescue mission of American hostages in Iran during his presidency.

Wow, what a legacy.  And that’s before we get to all his great work these days with Hamas.

As for me, when I think Jimmy Carter, only one thing really comes to mind:

David Broder today:

But if Obama contributed to the Wright fiasco through his hesitancy to break with him, Clinton was worse. She flooded North Carolina and Indiana with phoniness — playing a drag version of Dennis Kucinich, a beer-drinking populist, not the honors graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School that she is.

Broder’s tsk-tsk’ing aside … Hillary Clinton playing a drag version of Kucinich?  Awesome!  Count us in!

Remember: Drag works quite well for politicians.  Just ask Rudy Giuliani.

…. so it seems Barack Obama is becoming more and more a man of the people:

Early yesterday at a diner in Greenwood, Ind., Obama took a seat at the counter, ordered a ham-and-feta-cheese omelet  …

Of course, like most everyday Americans, I typically take my feta with a splash of V-8.

Yup, no doubt about it now.  Tim Kaine will be Barack Obama’s running-mate.

Proof?  Easy: the Virginia governor now has his own YouTube channel.

From Tuesday’s seven-paragraph-long announcement:

Governor Timothy M. Kaine today announced the creation of his own YouTube channel on the popular online video sharing site that allows people to watch and share originally created videos.  The channel, www.youtube.com/vagovernor, features video clips of public service announcements, speeches and public forums with the Governor. Governor Kaine’s channel is part of the Virginia government community of channels.

“I am pleased to join the Virginia government community of YouTube channels,” Governor Kaine said. “The use of new media to deliver information online is vital to engage citizens in the process of government.”

In the future, the channel hopes to expand video coverage of press conferences and other appearances.

Naturally, we wish the governor best of luck engaging citizens with this “popular online video sharing site that allows people to watch and share originally created videos.”  YouTube, for short.  We just hope that, as the channel expands, there will enough bandwidth to handle Kaine’s eyebrow.

From the Washington Post:

Obama has tended to be detached from day-to-day campaign operations. He attended only a handful of fundraising events between Jan. 1 and Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, and few since his losses in Texas and Ohio on March 4. Cassandra Q. Butts, a law school friend and domestic policy adviser, recalled a time when she phoned him after reading ABC News’s the Note, a daily political blog frequented by Washington insiders. His response: “Why are you focusing on that, Cassandra?”

We haven’t seen Obama distance himself from something so quick since the old Jeremiah Wright days.

How Barack Obama ended his victory speech in North Carolina:

“May God bless you and the United States of America.”

Damn he’s good!

Barack Obama at an Indianapolis rally last night:

We need the American people to have influence in Washington. We need the American people to listen to

That’s one of the differences we have, Senator Clinton and myself.  She thinks that lobbyists represent real Americans. But I’ll bet in this crowd there aren’t a lot of people who are represented by lobbyists.

That’s a bet Obama would probably lose.  The Indiana Registration Commission lists hundreds of state-level lobbyists. Meantime,  Opensecrets.org lists 48 federally-registered lobbyists working on behalf of Indiana interests.  And those are just Indiana-specific lobbyists.
Chances are most people in the Obama crowd last night have had their lives touched by the lobbyists, whether they know it or not.  And whether that’s good or bad is a value for others to argue.   But the fact remains: There are few Indianans, few Americans, whose are not represented in some way by lobbyists.

Quite an accomplishment, even for Richard Cohen, in Tuesday’s Washington Post.  He pulls off the personal pronoun in the second word of his column…

Sometimes I think the best thing about Barack Obama is that little empty space on his lapel.

… and concludes his column with the personal pronoun just three words from the end…

For all it says about Obama, I salute it.

And his op-ed really isn’t about him, as tough as that is to believe.  Talk about greatness.  For all it says about Cohen, let’s salute him.