How strange life can be. One day, you’re a low-profile lieutenant governor of New York, little known beyond Albany. Then the next day, the governor himself gets caught up in a prostitution scandal, you become chief executive, your state’s superstar junior U.S Senator is chosen to become the next Secretary of State and YOU get to name her replacement with the whole world watching. Whew!

Well, all that didn’t actually happen on one day, but I sort of telescoped things for dramatic purposes. Not that Governor David Paterson needs any more drama on this succession question. If you’ve been following the news, you know it’s up to him and him alone to name Hillary Clinton’s replacement after she moves to the State Department next month. Naming a U.S. Senator: that’s quite a responsibility, considering it’s a call made with no oversight by either voters or other elected officials. But what oversight there is, in a manner of speaking, comes from the complex web of political considerations that will go into Paterson’s choice. Who does he want to please with his selection? Who does he NEED to please? What are the considerations for his own political future? What pressures is he feeling from the national democratic party and the U.S. Senate leadership?

Something changed for me today in the way I view the financial crisis. I’m sure I’m not alone; the stock market losing nearly a thousand points in 36 hours can have the effect of, as Samuel Johnson would put it, focusing the mind wonderfully. Johnson was referring to the prospect of being hanged. After today, I’m not sure I’m seeing all that much difference between the two situations.

Of course, we’ve been reporting on this collapse for over two months now, so maybe I’m a little late to the pity party. But I suspect this week, with the plummeting dow and the existential threat to the nation’s auto industry and the predictions of doom for retailers, has brought a lot of people to the realization that we are in very, very serious trouble, and heading into deeper trouble..

If Senate Majority leader Harry Reid was really serious today when he said “nobody was more angry than me” about Joe Lieberman campaigning against Barack Obama during the presidential race, he needs to go check out the liberal blogs tonight, like here and here. After Reid’s democratic caucus voted overwhelmingly to let Lieberman return to their fold with only mild punishment, he’ll be able to find lots and lots of people who seem muuuuuuuuuuuch more angry than he ever was with the Connecticut Senator.

Rereading my blog post of last week about Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman’s future in the Democratic party, I’m now struck by how my assumptions in the piece were based on a Washington political paradigm that may no longer exist. Lieberman’s fate in the wake of his fervent support for defeated presidential candidate John McCain, as well as his negative attacks on Barack Obama, his own party’s candidate, has been much in discussion this week. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking—assuming, I should say again—that Lieberman would be treated as a traitor by his fellow democrats; that he would be stripped of his committee chairmanships, sent to the furthest reaches of the back bench (if he was allowed to caucus with Democrats at all), denied support for any of his legislative efforts, made to wear a big red clown nose, and perhaps even be given a wedgie.

Barack Obama, as US President-elect, speaking during first post-election press conference after meeting with his economic advisory team, behind him are (l-r): Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and newly appointed Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Chicago, Illinois. (AP/November 7, 2008)

He made it through 19-months of a grueling campaign without ever really seeming tired. But after three days of being President-elect… and three days of finding out more about the scope and depth of the financial crisis.. I thought Barack Obama looked a little weary today at his first news conference since the election. Who could blame him? What a whiplash that has to be: the ecstasy of winning a historic presidential race, followed immediately by a fuller understanding of just how hard the job is going to be. One politico joked to me on Tuesday that the winner of the race was going to demand a recount.

There will be countless essays, columns, and blog posts in the days and weeks ahead, analyzing and deconstructing Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential race this week. We want to grasp the magnitude of it all, the surreal enormity of this change to the American political and societal landscape. Capturing it in words? Well, it’s a big job.

So let me focus here on just one cultural element of what it means to America and the world to have Barack Obama as our next president:

Cool is back.

Dear Mike,

May I call you Mike? It’s so much less formal. First of all, congrats on the term limits thing. Actually, that’s sort of what I wanted to write you about. I have some thoughts about your political future, and it doesn’t include you running for mayor again.

It was just last year, but already it seems sort of quaint that the role of bloggers in the body politic was being belittled by the mainstream media. In this presidential election, political blogs... at least the big ones attracting the most internet traffic... have played a huge part in how this presidential campaign has unfolded.

Damn! I KNEW I should have gotten that Ph.D. in economics. It would sure come in handy these days. While it’s certainly possible to read nonstop about the causes of the current financial crisis and the wisdom or lack thereof for the administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout, I think I speak for many of us when I ask, what the hell is going on? By the way, that’s actually a quote in today’s New York Times from Bruce Bartlett, a former economist in the Reagan administration.

Here’s what he said: “The problem is people are operating in a world in which nobody knows what the hell is going on.” And this guy DOES have a Ph.D. in economics.

That’s probably my favorite new phrase to come out this long and torturous presidential race. And it’s the reason why I’m not going to blog about the race anymore.

The phrase comes from one of the top advisors to one of the candidates. It means, essentially, phony impartiality by the media covering the race; that while it’s expected that political journalists doing so-called “straight” news, not commentary, be evenhanded to both sides, evenhandedness itself becomes a lie when it prevents greater truths from being told. When the topic is blatant lies being told by one campaign, the symmetry of sin calls for reporters to say, essentially, that the other side does it, too. Even if doesn’t, or doesn’t do it nearly as much. It’s “objectivity” that is extremely misleading.

I just watched the beginning of the newscast (the “top” of the show, if you speak newsroom-ese) for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the open to the show when the big stories in the broadcast are ”teased” for a few seconds before the anchor shows up on camera. For the first time in many weeks, the presidential campaign didn’t make the cut on this newscast preview. Instead, the Wall Street financial crisis, the devastation left behind by Hurricane Ike in Texas, and the aftermath of the horrible commuter train crash in Los Angeles got the nod.

I was going to write tonight about the words and phrases used with numbing repetitiveness over the course of the national political conventions the past two weeks. Let’s run down just a few:

• “Vetting” It’s something that was either done insufficiently with Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign, or something that was overdone by the mean old media. Either way, time to give it a rest.

• “Maverick” The old John McCain label made a big comeback this week. It means being independent in thought and action. The problem is, I don’t think real mavericks go around talking about what mavericks they are. If everybody in the group acclaims you as a maverick, then, by definition, you aren’t one. Interestingly, the other definition of maverick is an unbranded stray calf, that’s considered the property of the first person who brands it. That could be an interesting political metaphor.

• “Hockey Mom” Are moms from every single sport eventually going to be broken into distinct demographic voting blocks? Do you campaign differently with hockey moms than with soccer moms? Are there enough hockey moms to throw the election one way or the other?

• “Elite” It was generally used by Republicans this week as an insult, directed at either the media or Barack Obama. And yet “elite” is defined as “the best or most skilled members of a group.” This is strange. It’s like saying, “don’t vote for him, he’s the best.” Read more after the jump.

Gov. Sarah Palin's speech Wednesday night fired up Republican delegates at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Getty Images)

If there were any hopes left that the 2008 presidential election would be the dawning of a post-partisan age in Washington, a time when political issues would trump political insults, they were shattered last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. Insults were the order of the evening, especially from Sarah Palin. The plucked-from-obscurity vice presidential nominee delivered more of a Don Rickles routine than a speech, and I think it’s going to backfire for the Republicans.

Here was a real opportunity to introduce not only a new face on the American political scene, but a new perspective, a new paradigm, even. Who better to guide us away from the hateful politics that have divided our nation these past 15-years, than someone like Governor Palin? A mom, a parent of a special needs child, a charismatic woman and speaker, who’s proved in her limited time in public life to be a mover and shaker, someone from a part of the country almost no one knows. It could all have been so NEW and fresh and hopeful, and I’m guessing many of the 37-million people who watched the speech, almost as many as watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver last week, wanted to hear a message with exactly those qualities.

A Georgian woman holding her baby cries over her damaged home in Gori, Georgia, just outside the breakaway province of South Ossetia Aug. 10, 2008. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

Who in the world could have ever imagined that during the Beijing Olympics, China would become the SECOND-most watched and controversial nation on the globe? Russia’s invasion of Georgia has turned from a border incursion a few days ago into what appears to be an all-out war, and a very savage one, at that. There have been many civilian deaths. Russian troops and tanks are splitting the former Soviet Republic in two, and Monday a Georgian embassy official in Moscow said it appears Russia’s goal is nothing less than the “complete liquidation” of the Georgian government.

If you’ve been keeping up with the conflict, you know there’s a small portion of Georgia known as South Ossetia, where separatists have operated as an independent nation, ethnically and politically closer to Russia than the West-leaning government of Georgia. Both sides claim the other started this week’s hostilities. Whichever is true, initial skirmishes between Georgian forces and separatists brought Russia into the conflict, and the tanks began rolling. (For a superb summation of the causes of the conflict, as well as how natives of Georgia here in New York are reacting, check out this story from Friday night by CW11 reporter Chris Glorioso after the jump.)

Britney Spears and Paris Hilton?

Oh, my. This got out of hand MUCH sooner than I expected.

John McCain's new anti-Obama ad, unveiled Wednesday, aims to link the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to two pop tarts whose names have become synonomous with shallowness, outsized celebrity status, undersized talent, poor driving habits, and dubious parenting skills. Among other things.

When I heard about the ad, I couldn't see how it could be effective for McCain. If you're going to link someone to someone else in the minds of people seeing the ad, there should be some valid points of comparison. Looking at the list above, I just don't see where there's that much common ground between Mr. Obama and Ms.'s Hilton and Spears. Even his detractors would be hard-pressed to say Obama isn't a bright guy, so that rules shallowness out. He's obviously talented in his chosen field of politics, or we wouldn't be having this little talk, would we? I don't think there have been any negative things said about his role as father to his two little girls. I'm not sure if he's a good driver or not.

Obviously the one thing they DO have in common is that they're all famous. But this is a curious tactic for McCain. As our CW11 reporter Chris Glorioso said on the news last night, it puts McCain in the odd position of criticizing his opponent for being popular and well-known. And not well-known because he made a sex tape or didn't wear underpants. He's well-known because he's a U.S. Senator, a powerful speaker, and he's running for president. Read more after the jump.

If you type the phrase “political junkies” in Google, you get nearly 600-thousand websites. But when you put, instead: “Define: political junkies,” you get, precisely, none. Zero. And, yes, I made sure all the words were spelled correctly. (Did you know Google was also a dictionary? Actually, it’s almost every dictionary. Type in Define:, then the word or phrase you’re searching for, and you’ll get definitions from just about every published dictionary in several languages. I know it’s probably not cool to still be impressed by Google, but I’m just sayin’..)

Of course, we all know what a political junkie is, even without a formal definition. It’s someone who eats, drinks, sleeps, reads, blogs, reads blogs, and most of all, WATCHES, political news. And in a presidential election year, life is one, big long overdose for a political junkie.

All well and good. Junkies of all stripes should get their fixes. (I don’t speak here, of course, of a true junkie; Google definition: a narcotics addict). I mean people into sports, Star Wars, crossword puzzles, whatever. But with political junkies, especially when it comes to cable television news, the power they wield is is becoming disproportionate.