While there’s seven states voting in primaries or caucuses next Tuesday, I’ll be covering mainly two here, South Carolina and North Dakota. Other TAS team members will be covering the rest. They’ll also be covering next Saturday’s caucuses in Michigan and Washington, and next Sunday’s Maine caucuses, too.

The National Overview

John Kerry holds leads in many states after his twin wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Although there are some states where others are close or ahead of Kerry, the majority seem to be shaping up as contests to determine Number Two.

With funding opportunities getting the squeeze, Dean, Edwards, Clark and Lieberman need more Top Two showings to bolster their case for continuing their campaigns as the chief contender to Kerry. Within 18 days, there’ll only be one or two of these four left standing unless Kerry falters.
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moveon.org is calling for a “one minute boycott” of the superbowl on sunday.

our story so far: cbs has refused to air the winning “bush in 30 seconds” ad (”child’s pay”), based on the principle that they don’t air ads made by progressive blogs that make fun of c+ students in positions of power, or something like that. luckily for us, somebody at cnn goofed and accepted the ad, which will be shown on cnn at 8:10 and 8:35 eastern, 5:10 and 5:35 real time.

so, moveon would like everyone to change their tv channels at those times to watch “child’s pay” on cnn. we’re not sure what that will do in terms of actual effects on sponsorship, but at least we get to see the winning ad on tv.

moveon asks that you register your dissent on this page on their website.
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we have blogged earlier this week about a report found on blah3 that robert novak assaulted a new hampshire citizen who accused him of being a traitor.

on our comments section (over on our own pugilistic blog, where we also wrote about this), person of choler [ed. note: we still don’t get that joke], our gadfly from the other side of the aisle, insisted in two separate posts that it was par for the course, because after all, ” as al franken has recently established, it is permissible for political commentators to knock down people with whom they disagree.”

we then googled al franken and heckler, and boy, look what we got! tons of reports that franken had “body slammed” a poor, unassuming man at a dean rally, whose only crime was that he was shouting anti-dean rhetoric. oh the horror! oh the supression of free speech! oh the reminders of how unfunny snl was during the 80’s!
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I was watching some of the Senate Armed Services Committee David Kay hearings the other day, and chairman John Warner (R-Virginia) mentioned something about a weapons “kash-ay”.

At first I though he just misspoke, but he kept saying “kash-ay” and “kash-ays” over and over. Finally I realized he was talking about weapons “caches”.

I was mortified. I have been saying “cache” wrong all these years. It would not be the first time I had adopted an embarrassing mispronouncitation of a word. People in meetings must have thought I was an ignorant hillbilly bumpkin.
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