Today Rudy Giuliani echoed Newt Gingrich and said he sees a Clinton/Obama ticket and says he will defeat them easily. There is something I don’t quite understand about Giuliani’s electoral math though or his thoughts about winning the presidency.

He has continually stated he is the only Republican with a chance of taking NY State & California. But a Clinton/Obama ticket would undoubtedly guarantee a win for the Democrats. I couldn’t possibly imagine California not handing a victory to Obama and I couldn’t see NY State not handing a victory to Clinton or vice versa.

I think most Republicans can easily spot that NY & California won’t be heading their way anytime soon. Frankly they will have a hard enough time keeping non-amazingly-left-leaning states. So why would they vote for Giuliani if his big plan is to take NY/California and he just asserted the liberal/moderate dream team of 2008 running against him? Because he thinks he can rally Republicans against Clinton/Obama?

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Unlike this weekends Republican debate I am somewhat curious about tonight’s Democratic debate, though I will probably not watch the entire thing too in-depth. The only big reason I have interest, obviously, is because Obama & Edwards look ready to pounce on Clinton.

The Democrats seem like a party not ready to ever learn from its mistakes or at the very least learn the wrong lessons from them. After watching the primary season of 2004 in which Democrats bashed the daylights out of one another and gave Republicans a boatload of ammunition, I thought this election cycle the Dems might learn from the Republicans, pick a consensus candidate and move onto building up a national movement. Well, I seemed wrong in that thinking.

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The NY Post is reporting that the New York Times board has decided to open up its editorial & op-ed content for free on the Internet. If this is true its great news for all of us online especially bloggers.

If you don’t know editorial & op-ed content from the Times went to the paid subscription model under TimesSelect. It has always been something that pissed off bloggers and I have to imagine consumers in general and it was a move I understood but knew would ultimately fail.

By having Times columnists behind a cyber-brick-wall of payment the paper all but guaranteed their columnists were not read online. As a blogger who links heavily to columnists it meant I had to ignore an entire national newspaper when linking because readers would have to pay to see the content I was referring to. Not the “open-source” vision of the world most of us online enjoy.

Frankly I came to realize I didn’t need the Times columnists and op-ed anyway and could find the sentiment and facts elsewhere (I would read the thoughts in the Times and then point to their source material or people who had like viewpoints) so really the paper just screwed themselves all around online.

Still it is great news if its true.

I don’t mean to rip another blog, especially Huffington Pos which I read every day and enjoy alongside Drudge (the two fill in the holes of the other) but I did want to comment on something. Right now if you visit the page you see this headline:

It reads “Exclusive Caught on Tape: Clinton Rips Murdoch WSJ Deal”

The problem? The actual article it points to says no such thing. Bill Clinton actually rips the WSJ Editorial Board, thats true, but he actually says he told a friend he would support the deal as long as Murdoch doesn’t turn the non-editorial board part of the paper into a right-leaning machine. His premise was that the WSJ editorial board was even more right-wing than Murdoch alone could ever make it, so there would be no difference, just that the actual reporters themselves always did a good job of being fair and Clinton wants that tradition to continue.

Huffington Post has had an obvious slant toward Barack Obama for the last few months digging as far as they can to portray Clinton as poorly as possible and Obama as favorably as possible. Which is really odd as Drudge, whom in many ways was largely responsible for the evolution of the coverage of the Lewinsky scandal, is pretty balanced on Clinton printing a fairly even mix of positive and negative news (though not so positive about Obama.)

I personally have been tuff on Obama because frankly he keeps making some pretty large errors and has made more in the last few months that the media seemed to give him a pass on because he was starting. It is one thing to point out flaws and it is also one thing to pick a side and want to fight for it. It is a whole other thing when you mislead ESPECIALLY about an article dealing with keeping the news accurate and fair.

I just thought that headline in particular was blatantly misleading and was worth pointing out.

From USA Today it appears Senator Hillary Clinton has moved up eight points to 48%, Obama moved down two to 22% Edwards is at 12%.

“People are seeing her as the one ready to be president,” Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist, told Susan. Bill Burton, Obama’s spokesman, dismissed the findings. “National polls may go up and down before people actually start voting, but their irrelevance will not,” he said.

I WOULD like to add with those quotes that if there is a shift at some point in polling it will be nice to see how they change. I could quickly see Clinton switching to the “polls don’t matter” camp while Obama turned to the “polls mean everything” camp.