We might be in need of his skills soon, as the Primary contest starts getting interesting. The Dean campaign continues to impress; this weekend it wiped the Vice President's fund-raising attempt off the map, by simply issuing a challenge to the Internet community. And a new poll out today shows that Dean is now tying for the lead in the Democratic nomination race. Of course, the same survey shows that only 66% of people questioned want someone who'll stand up for what they believe in, and 30% would vote for lying scum, as long as he would beat Bush. Sigh. One of these days, somebody should try and run for both nominations, just to see how many votes they can pick up…

Finishing off the US Primary talk for today, the neoconservative-leaning Weekly Standard handicaps the current Democrat contenders, and seems to be quite positive about Dean's chances. It's rumoured he's the candidate that the Bush team would like to face, as Dean is a loud critic of both the Iraq war and the recent tax cuts, and they'd dearly like to peg the Demoncrats as peacenik hippies who want to tax America to the hilt. (The typo was unintentional, but I thought it was amusing, so I left it in)

I really hope there's a department in the Pentagon that's dedicated to making up insane ideas in order to distract people from news they'd rather didn't get a wide airing (e.g. the increasing casualty figures in Iraq). Because, I'd like to think that DARPA didn't get all the way to announcing their terrorism futures scheme without somebody saying "Dude! You're planning to make a terrorist stock exchange? Are you nuts!!?!?"