Reuters/C-SPAN/Houston Chronicle Poll: Clinton Rebounds as Closing Campaign Boosts Her Barely Ahead of Obama in Texas - Tied in Ohio!  —  Republican McCain leads in Texas and Ohio  —  UTICA, New York - On the strength of some strong campaigning in Ohio and Texas, Democrat Hillary Clinton …

Ask Tough Questions?  Yes, They Can!  —  SAN ANTONIO It took many months and the mockery of “Saturday Night Live” to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.

Rush Limbaugh Explains Why He's Urging Republicans in Texas and Ohio to Vote for Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday 2  —  This is a rush transcript from “The O'Reilly Factor,” February 29, 2008.  This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.  —  Watch “The O'Reilly Factor” …

Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk About Gender Issues And The Blogosphere  —  Every so often in the blogosphere, on the Left and the Right, hostile debates over gender seem to rise up to the surface like a leviathan from the depths.  Some male bloggers tend to think women …

An Iraqi Sea Change  —  Question: What is the most extraordinary thing about the following extraordinary sentence? … Answer: It is the lead of a story in today's New York Times.  The paper of record, which for the past few years could accurately be described as a body count with a styles section …

Hillary today: John McCain has more experience than Obama … From DailyKos: … Labels: hillary clinton, negative campaigning

Are Women Dumb?  —  Whoa.  I just read the Charlotte Allen piece in the Washington Post Outlook section that Kathryn linked to Sunday.  (Unpromisingly Titled, “We Scream.  We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?")  I want to believe that the Post got as much dissident mail on that one as it deserved.

Lobbyist to run McCain's Hill effort  —  Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has engaged a leading GOP lobbyist to coordinate his message and travel schedule with congressional Republicans — the most concrete sign yet that the biggest battleground in the 2008 presidential race …

Anti-Quran film to air in Netherlands  —  THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Protesters already have torched Dutch flags in Afghanistan ahead of a new Dutch film portraying Islam's holy book as a “fascist” text that incites violence and preaches the oppression of women and homosexuals.

Mukasey's Paradox  —  When you think about it, his manipulations are a beautiful, twisted thing.  —  The recent decisions of Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism.

THE BIG STORY  —  Zogby has Clinton moving back ahead of Obama in Texas (47%-44%), a six point net move from the day before, and tied in Ohio (44%-44%), a two point move.  Bear in mind that Zogby is actually an outlier in having it even close in Ohio and there now seems little doubt that …

Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction  —  In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The $2 Trillion Nightmare  —  We've been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race.  But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.