Hillary is methodically taking away Obama's inexperience as a national candidate. Her bruising, all-out, sometimes inexcusable campaign against him is providing a clinic in how to fight off a big dog. When he faces McCain he'll have savvy, resiliency, poise and a willingness to get a little dirty that he wouldn't have had if she'd gone away quietly in February. The Clinton campaign is handing the GOP its tactics (as well as borrowing from them), yes. Money is getting squandered, yes. We're eating our young and looking like idiots yet again, yes. But we're also registering voters at 10-20 times the rate of the Republicans, and stealing airtime that they might have used. So maybe this ridiculous brawl can also help as a sparring match before the big fight.

From Sunday's NYT: The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are. Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and…

The Democrats finally found some backbone on spying and the House voted today to reject immunity for telecoms who colluded with the NSA and the president, and to add more restrictions onto the Bush illegal spying program. Here's Glenn Greenwald: One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework. It is possible that the House will ultimately end up capitulating to the President, but I have real doubts about whether that will happen. They have defied the standard GOP Terrorism-exploitation…