Josh Benson

Hillary Clinton discusses her crime-fighting plan in West Philadelphia. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Paul Begala voices his “contempt” for Mark Penn. [HuffingtonPost]  read more »

From intern Matt Townsend on Fifth Avenue:

There are about 40 members of the media here outside Eliot Spitzer's apartment building. Three sets of police baricades are set up just off the driveway entrance to the building. There are five satelite trucks parked within a block of the building.

A CBS cameraman said he arrived at 4:30 a.m. and that there were only a handful of reporters on overnight watch. Some of the media on stakeout duty thought that Spitzer would come out around 9 a.m., but he still hadn't left the building as of 10:30 a.m.

Harold Ickes wants it known that Barack Obama is the front-runner. [Marc Ambinder]

Bill Clinton says it's Texas and Ohio or else. [Political Radar]

Birnbaum asks: "How much longer?" [JustHillary]  read more »

Jason Horowitz talks to some Clinton fund-raisers about the architecture of the campaign’s attack strategy on Barack Obama, talking-points and all. Among other things, campaign staffers sent out (from personal email addresses) a blog post suggesting that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick hasn’t lived up to his campaign rhetoric since getting into office, and neither would Obama.

Clinton surrogate Bob Kerrey doesn’t seem to like the strategy very much at all.  read more »

Bob Kerrey, a Hillary Clinton supporter, is not on board with the Michigan-and-Florida-delegate tactic. [The Villager]

Christine Pelosi, a daughter of Nancy and a superdelegate, thinks a squabble between the Clinton and Obama campaigns over debates is “dumb.” [Huffington Post]  read more »

John Koblin meets twins who blog, discovers that a Ron Paul party distracted Times reporters on deadline, and witnesses an interesting moment involving Hillary Clinton, Bill O’Reilly and a girl with red hair.

Choire talks to some Paul revolutionaries.

Choire watches Mike Huckabee talk about Arabs, sand, "illegals" and prostitutes. And Chuck Norris.

The Mets lost today by the score of 8-1, missing the postseason after having led their division by 7 games with 17 to play.

I know this to be true because I was at Shea Stadium to see it. Otherwise, it would be difficult for me to believe that any professional baseball team—let alone one that spent nearly the entire season in first place—could end its year in such spectacularly poor fashion.  read more »

Phil Rizzuto, the former MVP Yankee shortstop and baseball commentator, died today at the age of 89.  read more »

Seen as Prelude to ’08, ‘Although My Plans For Future Haven’t Changed’.  read more »

As part of the launch of the new Observer website, there’s going to be a slight change in comments policy here.

Bad news first: readers will be required to go through a one-time registration before they can comment. The registration requires a username--which can be anything--and an email address, which is used to send secure automated responses to users when they do things like change their password. This won’t prevent anyone from commenting anonymously, and we won't see or use your email address for anything that's not a service you ask for specifically.

The good news is that there’s going to be more stuff to comment on: the Politicker and the other blogs, as before, but also the stories and columns in each week’s paper as well as the web-only features that we’re going to start posting a lot more frequently.

The new system will make us much better at weeding out spam – the sort of stuff that slows things down for everyone.

And to the extent that the registration process has a chilling effect on the very small number of readers who visit the site to post poop-and-fart jokes about the subjects of our coverage (and other commenters, and random staffers, and people we’ve never heard of) we’re prepared to live with it.

But enough about us…  read more »

Sort of.  read more »