Republicans think they've discovered the way to beat Democrats in this year's election, with a strategy that can be summed up as: drilling for votes. Democrats, confident that logic is on their side in the oil drilling debate, may be ignoring this at their peril. It is too early to tell, of course, but the Democrats need to come up with a way to frame the debate to their advantage fast, or else they risk appearing as if they have no idea what to do about high gas prices.

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For only the fourth (or fifth, depending on how you count) time in his presidency, George W. Bush had a veto overridden by both houses of Congress this week. This is big news, since it doesn't happen very often.

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While plenty has happened in the past two weeks which bears close and careful analysis, I'd like to begin by focusing on one event. Barack Obama announced a masterstroke of political tactics last week, and I don't think everyone has appreciated fully what it is going to mean. I say this not as an "Obamamaniac," or as some starry-eyed follower who has been caught up in his "personality cult," but rather as a political observer (with an admitted left-wing bias) applauding a Democratic candidate on a monumentally brilliant decision.

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While this week's awards and talking points section largely focuses on what Congress has been up to rather than the presidential campaign, I did want to say it's very heartening to see Barack Obama set up a website to counter the smears that are being circulated about him. These slime-jobs are only going to get worse as the summer progresses, so it's a good thing to see Obama moving to cut them off at their knees. Sure, the people who get these forwarded email attacks probably won't see his site, but the media will have a one-stop shop to refute such attacks, instead of just blindly repeating them on the air (as some of them have been doing).

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USA Today (of all places) has a great page on their site where you can play "call the election." It comes complete with electoral maps back to 1960, for reference (warning: Democrats shouldn't click on 1984 or 1972 unless they're sitting down, preferably with a strong drink handy). It starts you off with what they consider "safe" states already marked (their definition: safe states voted the same way in the last four presidential elections), but you can click "all undecided" to start with a clean slate, if you prefer. The good news: their "safe state" starting point starts at 248 Democratic, 135 Republican.

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All signs are pointing to (are you sitting down?) a landslide election for Democrats this year. We might not just win, we might win big. Very big.

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So here we are, examining the "crucial" battleground states for the nomination... nearing the "back of the line" of the primary calendar. While I did lay out the possibility of an open convention in that article, I also shied away from making an actual prediction that it would happen. I'm still not ready to do that, as I still think there is a good chance the race will be over this Wednesday morning. Now (to prove I highlight my mistakes as well), I think this is something like the fourth or fifth time I have predicted "it's going to be over in a matter of days." To date, I've been wrong every single time. Nobody's perfect.

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Yesterday, all 29 cargo ports on the West Coast were shut down, although it wasn't terrorism that did it. It was the longshoremen, in a one-day strike. Media coverage, beyond some local newspapers, was almost completely non-existent.

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I must admit, I was kind of surprised at the ferocity of the response, myself. Because I actually expected exactly what happened during the first hour of the debate -- shallowness and insipid "gotcha" questions. This is, after all, the mainstream media we are talking about. Did anyone really think it was suddenly going to morph into PBS on debate night?

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In any case, Charlie Gibson asked the question of both of them, and when neither gave a clear answer, pressed them on it. Because the debate was held in Philadelphia, "the Constitution" was some sort of weird thematic "hook" that ABC was pushing, and Gibson tried to use this in an elitist smartest-kid-in-the-class way. The only problem, he got his facts massively wrong. On two levels. The stupidity he displayed was of monumental proportions. Here is his question:

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