Is Hillary's nomination a sure thing? Six months ago, it was almost a certainty. Global name recognition combined with a campaign war chest she's had no problem filling seemed like it would be enough to make other potential nominees wither.Then in comes Barack Obama.If she's the insider that sounds like establishment, he's the newcomer that sounds like an outsider. He has the kind of political star power that we haven't seen since John F. Kennedy. And his foibles have, at least so far, worked in his favor.His limited experience draws parallels to Abraham Lincoln. An admission to once using cocaine

� Did President Bush in his State of the Union speech last night just give more businesses a green light to drop health insurance coverage for employees?Despite a glowing economy, more and more Americans can not afford health insurance, don't have access to it at work or have made the decision to go without it, presumably to pay other bills like rent and fuel. The number has risen from 40 million in 2000 to about 46.5 million in 2005 according to the government's own figures. Like Katrina, which wasn't even mentioned in the President's speech, the figures show a contradictory

He's leaving for the superintendent's job in Boston. No, he turned it down.Yes, he's going, but he'll finish the school year in Rochester.No, he changed his mind and he's not going to Boston.Yes, he's leaving, but now it's to Albany to join Spitzer's team.And nobody's talking until sometime next week.So goes Superintendent Manuel Rivera's job-change drama. The story that he had changed his mind first appeared in the Boston Globe yesterday. According to the Globe, negotiations over a $300,000-a-year, five-year contract fell apart when Rivera and the Boston district couldn't agree on how much Rivera would be paid in a

Well, now we'll see: Eliot Spitzer has promised reform, but it looks like business as usual with other Democrats in Albany.The Democrats will choose a replacement for Comptroller Alan Hevesi, and Assembly Leader Shelly Silver wants that person to be a member of Assembly. Spitzer had persuaded Silver to let an independent panel select up to five finalists for the job, though. And when the panel announced its choices yesterday, there were only three. None were politicians.Silver isn't happy. And according to today's New York Times, he says he doesn't have to pay any attention to the panel.The panel was

Former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, announced his run for the presidency on last Sunday's Meet the Press. Huckabee began by talking about his desire to see American politics become less divisive. But when NBC host Tim Russert pressed Huckabee on his views of gay marriage, for example, the bobbing and weaving began. Huckabee is against gay marriage, civil unions and gay adoptions.Defending his homophobia, Huckabee said we should be doing more to strengthen the relationships between men and women before we redefine the family and marriage.Then he reminisced about the good ol' days of the 1950's.Russert asked him to explain