by Phoenix Woman [courtesy of Firedoglake]

Last Monday I did a piece on how the AP has joined the local media in the Twin Cities in enabling a certain paid Republican operative and blogger named Michael Brodkorb, treating him as respectfully as they do Matt Drudge, even though (like Drudge) he's known for spewing bogosities. And like the national press, the Twin Cities press isn't as deferent to non-conservative bloggers; the same media that cites Brodkorb by name as an honest and "independent" source seem to suffer memory lapses where the contributions of lefty bloggers are concerned.

by Joseph A. Palermo [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

Sidney Blumenthal has written some wonderful and amazing political commentary in his day. He is clearly a brilliant person who knows exactly what he is...

by Matt Stoller [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

Chuck Todd:

"It's fascinating: Nobody's been a bigger victim of the so-called YouTube moments than Bill Clinton," Todd said. "I think Bill Clinton was woefully unprepared for 21st Century media."

Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.

Ah, remember the 1990s, those glorious days when Clinton could speak unmolested by a restrained media environment.  It's not like ABC News producers were pretty much advising the Starr investigators, that accusations that Clinton was a murderer were regularly thrown around with impunity, or that advisors of Clinton were accused of domestic violence with no evidence by Matt Drudge.

Bill Clinton is hated by the media in DC, he always has been.  By pretending like this is new, like Clinton is just unprepared for technology, Todd exculpates his industry's role in 1990s and 2000s of undermining democracy through dramatic bouts of misinformation culminating of course in the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the remarkable deception around the war.

John McCain gets basically no scrutiny, Obama and Hillary are subjected to immense amounts of it.  None of this justifies Bill, Hillary, or Obama's behavior, such as it is, but it is useful to notice how technological changes somehow allow people like Chuck Todd to maintain the illusion of their own lack of agency in politics.

by Jon Robin Baitz [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

Those of us who look at the Clintons and see the full dimensions of the failure of their promise to America will feel some sense of loss when Hillary withdraws. She shied away from greatness, so as to hold on to power.

by Seth Grahame-Smith [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

I've watched Hillary's descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.

by Marc Cooper [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

The Republican Right is already howling over the bombshell dropped by The New York Times on John McCain, the GOP's all-but-official nominee. But they've got it backwards. The Times, in fact, couldn't have found a moment more favorable for Johnny Mack to let this fearsome cat out of the bag. To say that if the Times had published its expose when it first had the story in December it would have changed the dynamic of the GOP race is perhaps the understatement of the decade. If it had come out two months ago, McCain would have been reduced to a political asterisk, a footnote alongside Tommy Thompson and Tommy Tancredo.