And, I'm sorry, no offense, but if you believe otherwise or if you think the Clintons are anything other than good Democrats, then you've drank the Kool-Aid and that puts you outside of the mainstream of the party.

Back during the primaries (and this is where I get myself in trouble), I took some comfort in the fact that those Democrats who apparently hate the Clintons were mostly children during his administration, so because his political opponents dominated the airwaves and his supporters were often dismissed as biased, their subconsciouses absorbed the hate.

When this all started, Hillary wasn't the obvious choice for Secretary of State, but as her name emerged, it was hard to argue against the instant gravitas of an internationally known entity. I can't really think of any other person, except maybe for a previous SoS who will be able to walk into a room, dominate it and there'd be no time wasted getting to know them or taking a measure of their personalities.

Sure, some might have preferred Bill Richardson, but most of them apparently don't remember his tenure during the Clinton administration and they seem to have some kind of ideal assigned to the man that isn't grounded in any reality.

Instead, what I'm hearing is that a lot of paid operatives are trying to distract from their poor performance by blaming a scapegoat and they're peddling these stories because the media and the public might buy them, they've taken the focus entirely off of their campaign failures and they might even get some facetime on CNN as a result, sometime down the road.

John McCain didn't lose because Sarah Palin answered the door in a towel. The Obama campaign outperformed them and McCain's handlers were idiots, but right now, there's nobody questioning the McCain management because a lot of people are too busy helping them blame Sarah.

Earlier, I saw perhaps one of the better examples of this post-election swing, when I watched a "Showbiz Tonight" analysis of "The View".

Colorado is to a lesser extent than Arizona or New Mexico, pretty much wholly populated by mostly one metropolitan area. You seem to discount Boulder and the Denver metro, but almost all of Colorado lives along the I-25 corridor. I don't know the politics of Colo Springs offhand, but from the street, they look like they could be kind of center-left, so that really leaves only Fort Collins as a place that I'd consider "pure McCain Country", without actually looking at any statistics.

And, again, I just seem to have a hard time labeling someplace "red", when they have a history of voting for Democrats statewide and to Congress, plus they've gone Democrat twice, since Johnson.

Quite frankly, if I had time (and if no one else volunteers, I might try and get to it later), but I'd be more interested in the correlation between states and the national winner. I mean, out of the last twelve elections, Colorado has voted ten times with the national winner and though you or I may not have chosen some of those guys, something probably could be said for "winner trumps party" or something along those lines.

I'll also remember your hint about "tipping", but there's really too many stories with a nationally political angle that doesn't appear on the mainpages, so if I were to "tip" with every overlooked item from all of the papers that I read on a regular basis, he'd be overwhelmed by his mailbox. That's why I figured posting something to the forum was as good as a tip; It allows me to flesh out (or in this case, link to a report about extraordinary state fundraising) and if it makes it onto a "recommended" list, it should theoretically act as a tipbox.

I mean, if they can't even bother to read their own forums, then why would I assume that they read their mail? I don't know the realities of TPMMuckraker, but I assume that it's a bunch of stringers and that whomever brought the story to its mainpage actually read it in the NM publication, first.

IOW: My comment was that if we have a lot of provisional ballots that will have to be discussed individually, then unless Obama can get a wider margin than the contestable number, it could theoretically put declaring a winner into the hands of the lawyers and not something that will be known on Election Day.

(Historically, they don't even start discussing provisional ballots until the next day)

I guess that I might be a little more forgiving of the reader submissions because I have occasionally made reference to repetitious posts by linking to my previous comment, but I kind of think that the paid staffers should at least pretend.

And, though I didn't include it in my main rant, but I also have to say that some of the most frustrating examples are when someone posts to the lefthand column, something that had been done to death on the right. I don't know how many times I've wanted to say; "As I commented yesterday to a plethora of posts..."