THE HIGH SCHOOL ROBOTICS COMPETITION kicks off!

HILLARY CLINTON: Obama’s too liberal! Yeah, that’ll work.

ABC NEWS says its viewers wanted the Dems to spend more time on the economy. Hardly any wanted to hear more about Iraq.

TOMORROW’S NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE leads with a big story on problems with electronic voting. Hey, there’s been an obvious solution for quite a while. (Via Bradblog).

SOME HDTV PREDICTIONS for 2008.

HRC, MIA.

GUY HERBERT: “Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials.” Britain ain’t what it used to be.

MARC AMBINDER’S SUM-UP on the Republican debate. “On points, Fred Thompson won the debate. Every answer was thoughtful and well-crafted; his tone matched the tone of the question; he wisely refrained from interjecting in the back and forth squabbling. He very deftly reminded viewers that he served on key Senate national security panels and is bringing his experience to bear. Even his insults were subtly and gently constructed.”

Plus, a gutsy move by Hillary: “Wow — HRC uses her husband’s failed strike at Pakistan in 1998 as a reason why caution should be exercised in this affair.”

UPDATE: Dan Riehl, on the other hand, thinks it was Romney.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yeah, that’s news if it’s true: “Bill Richardson just said that terrorists have obtained nukes in Russia. Really? Isn’t this like really, really, really, really big news? And bad?” All of the above, if it’s true.

MORE: Romney: Standing up against anti-pharma demagoguery. Good for him. How many sick people have you cured, Senator?

Peter Robinson: “Fred Thompson turned in a very fine performance, the more effective for proving underplayed. . . . If (as I expect) Romney fares badly in New Hampshire, Thompson will be the obvious choice for conservatives. He’s going to prove an easy man to rally around.”

Plus, a strangely touching moment: “ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who is moderating these back-to-back debates, asked at the conclusion of the Republican contest for the Democratic candidates to come out and shake hands with the Republicans. They had a civil minute of joshing and smiling. I don’t want to sound sappy, but there was something lovely about it.”

Josh Marshall: “Obama’s very solid. Edwards really tried to slam the door on Hillary permanently. She was … I’m not certain what the right word is, enraged? But it was a good response. Impassioned in ways that I think will play very well with some and probably not well with others. But really captured her argument as well as, I think you have to say, her anger at being in this position.”

STILL MORE: Exhaustion setting in? I can see why — but there’s an awfully long road ahead.

Plus, Stephen Green has been drunkblogging. “Finally, someone had the stones to defend the pharmacutical companies who, whatever their faults, make modern health care possible. That someone was Mitt Romney. Why wasn’t it free-marketeer Ron Paul? Well, after watching Paul’s performance so far tonight, I’ll tell you why: Paul knows that he’s already lost libertarians like me, and is counting on nothing but the anti-war vote. It’s that simple, and that craven.” But wait: “FINALLY, Paul is talking his principles. He’s taking a stand against the national ID card in general, and the welfare state in general. I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong.”

Plus this: “Obama is taking the easy lob, and looking good doing so. He’s got an easy command of the facts, even if he sounds a LOT more like Bush than any good (or bad, bar Lieberman) Democrat would ever admit.”

Also: “Clinton says we’re approach a recession, and she’s probably right. What’s telling is, her one statistic: The unemployment rate has increased to five whole percent. A modern recession is better than a 1970s growth period. Cool. . . . Bill Richardson just claimed that he “runs” the “state economy” of New Mexico. I can see him with his eyeshades and pencil, determining the markdowns at Safeway and the wage increases at Los Alamos National Laboratories. For the first time, Hillary has spent more time attacking her fellow Democrats than the Republicans. That’s a major change in strategy, and it speaks volumes. Big, womanly volumes of experienced change.”

Lots more from Freeman Hunt, including this: “This is the best debate format. Kudos to ABC and Charles Gibson.” And some advice that shouldn’t be necessary, but is: “Note to all GOP candidates: talk about and explain the free market more.”

Ann Althouse on the Democrats: “Will any of them admit the surge is a success? No.”

And there’s anti-Pharma demagoguery in the Democratic debate, too: “Clinton likes to accuse her opponents of having staff members who are ‘lobbyists for the drug companies.’ It’s a specious, meaningless charge. But shouldn’t someone point out that Mark Penn, chief Hillary strategist, is also CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm for Wyeth, Pfizer, Amgen and hundreds of other corporations? I don’t see anything wrong with Mark Penn’s career, but the depth of her phoniness is breathtaking.” It is, but I find it reassuring to think that she might just be in the pocket of Big Pharma. That should limit the demagoguery to words, not actions . . .

Finally, the cool kid versus the valedictorian. And here’s Ambinder’s wrapup on the Democrats’ debate.

AFTER QUOTING ONE OF MY READERS, JOE CARTER WRITES: “The fact that Reynolds (and many others) think that screwing over one’s employees is a central ‘free-market principle’ is disheartening.”

I can see how that would be disturbing, if it were true. My problem with Huckabee, however, is a bit different — it’s that when he talks about this stuff, he sounds like a slicker John Edwards.

UPDATE: Joe responds: “With all due respect to Reyonlds, anyone who thinks Governor Huckabee–a supply sider who favors reducing corporate tax rates, supports the Bush tax cuts, and proposes eliminating the AMT and the death tax–sounds like Sen. Edwards obviously hasn’t been paying attention to his actual message.”

Well, I guess his communications department needs to be doing a better job of getting that message out, as opposed to the “I’m a Christian!” message, which we all get by now. Because I’m hardly the only one to get this impression, and it’s come from Huckabee’s own statements.

THE PENTAGON and Islamic scholars.

Related item here.

BEWARE ALL THAT “American flag jingoism and Muslim fear mongering.”

Is it better if the purveyors “don’t believe all that stuff anyhow”?

JOHN PODHORETZ EMAILS: “I’ll be liveblogging the debate at Contentions, if anybody cares —
and given that it’s a Saturday night, nobody should.”

HILLARY’S BURDEN: He ran with Al Gore. She’s running with Al Batross. Heh.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

ROMNEY WINS in Wyoming.

UPDATE: More here. Thompson came in second.

ROBERT NOVAK: “Published reports that Fred Thompson soon will withdraw from the Republican presidential contest and endorse Sen. John McCain have been traced in part to Mitt Romney’s campaign, trying to stir up strife between McCain and Thompson.”

MORE ON HILLARY’S NEW HAMPSHIRE BOOS: But I like this line from the comments: “Hillary should have used the Spinal Tap excuse for getting booed, played it off as ‘They were still booing Obama when I got on stage.'”

She’s not losing popularity. Her appeal is just becoming more . . . selective.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll doubts that these boos will disappear the way those post-9/11 boos did.

FOR CERTAIN VALUES OF THE WORD EXTRAORDINARY: “Now a grape KitchenAid mixer is truly extraordinary.” Not that mixers aren’t cool.

CLASS AND PRIVILEGE: John Scalzi takes some professors to school. To me, a real signifier of class/privilege issues can be found in the answer to this question: “Do you feel socially superior to people who nonetheless make considerably more money than you?” If the answer is yes, you’re a member of the privileged class . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Brian Gates shoots me down. “I can refute your 2:18 post in one word: Britney.” Back to the drawing board, I guess . . .

RANDY BARNETT, misleadingly quoted on the Second Amendment by the A.P. It’s worth noting that this is an innocent, garden-variety press error, of the sort that happens regularly in the reportorial process, not the result of deliberate bias.

SO I SENT IN MY GRAMMY BALLOT TODAY, and it was slim pickings. I didn’t even vote in all the categories I’m entitled to vote in. There just wasn’t a lot of music that excited me this year, and most of that didn’t get nominated for a Grammy.

OBAMA AS Rorschach test.

IN THE MAIL: Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. If the portrait of Hillary in the book is as airbrushed as the portrait of Hillary on the cover, it’s not worth the $10.95 . . . .

WARNER GOES exclusively Blu-Ray.

I’M GUESSING THAT THIS STORY WON’T GET WIDE PLAY:

Iraq’s culture of corruption stems from the actions of the international community and the controversial UN oil-for-food scheme, the deputy prime minister Barham Saleh said on Thursday.

Speaking at a new anti-corruption forum in Baghdad, Saleh said that the programme, run between 1996 and 2003 while Iraq was under UN sanctions, and what he charged was the body’s wasteful use of money were to blame for the rampant corruption that bedevils Iraq.

“A large responsibility for the outbreak of corruption in Iraq lies on the international community,” said Saleh.

Now, if he’d blamed the United States, it’d be front-paged all over. . . .