In which Conan Scores Big PR Points

Nikki Finke is reporting that Conan will become the second late night host, after Letterman, to pay staffers out of his own pocket until the strike ends. Conan wrote for "The Simpsons", among other shows, and is a WGA member. Finke also reports that Carson Daly, who has been absolutely reamed for his decision to cross pickets, was going to lose his show if he didn't, so . . . yeah. Still wish he hadn't done it.

It's official: The Democrats have cancelled the CBS debate, partially because WGA wouldn't promise not to picket. Any Democrat who crossed pickets would pretty much immediately have his or her candidacy torpedoed in the primaries, because outfits like the AFL-CIO (affiliated with the WGA, East) hold enormous sway with the hardcore left that votes disproportionately in primaries. (Personally, I support Osama in 2008. He's the only one who will hunt down and capture Barack Obama. Ya burnt!)

A question I wonder about is if this hurts someone like Barack Obama, who recently rebooted his campaign and has once more been gaining ground on Hillary Clinton, to the point that she's no longer a prohibitive favorite. Obama is still far behind, and he needs to score another debate victory like he apparently did a few weeks ago (I find Democratic politics only slightly less distasteful than I find Republican politics, so I don't watch the debates and am going off what I've read) to keep his train running. On the other hand, he's probably wise at this point to be concentrating locally on Iowa, where he appears to have a good chance of winning, which would blow up the entire race, I suspect.

Nobody asked me, but I'm going to say it anyway: I think Hillary Clinton is a disaster candidate for the Democrats. You'd think they would have learned their lesson about nominating charismaless, swotty Senators in the Al Gore and John Kerry debacles, both of whom lost eminently winnable races, not because their ideas were any worse than George Bush's (Kerry didn't seem to have any actual ideas), but because they were stiff and boring. Clinton is essentially the same, except she comes with the bonus of being perhaps the most hated woman in America -- there's a massive section of the electorate who would seriously consider voting for, I don't know, Homer Simpson over Hillary Clinton, and just live with the fact that their next President was fictional. I've been saying for more than a year that the only way the Democrats could lose the upcoming election to the Republicans, short of the Contitution being changed so Arnold Schwarzahoozy could run, was to nominate Hillary Clinton, thereby gifting whatever lame candidate the Republicans are able to find a whole bunch of easily-plucked votes.

I, personally, have no animosity toward Hillary Clinton, and would probably vote for her over any of the lamebrain Republicans who might win the nomination, mostly because the extreme right wing of the party seems to have outlawed the reasonable center -- you know, the sort of person who doesn't deny the existence of the indisputable fact of evolution and recognizes that there's a distinction between "low taxes" and "small government", and that one doesn't necessarily imply the other. Also, Rudy Guliani scares the shit out of me. But I'm not the sort of person they need to convince. Self-professed feminists are not the kind to be scared off by Hillary Clinton. It's everybody else. People hate her. People hate her just as passionately as other people hate George Bush. That is a fundamental disqualification for national politics.

Okay, tangent over. Go about your day.