One question raised in the wake of Hillary Clinton's come-from-behind win is this: Does the press have a crush on Obama?

In composing the above post, I linked to the I Got A Crush On Obama vid.

In it, I saw this image:

This is relevant because John Kerry endorsed Obama today.

That would be the same John Kerry who lost to Dubya in 2004.

The Globe and Mail had a story today that noted while the polls were very close on the Republican outcome of the New Hampshire primary, they apparently blew it on the Democratic race.

One major difference: In the Democratic race, one leading candidate was a black man, while the other was a white woman.

Or is that too simple an explanation?

From Warren Kinsella:

The context in which he is writing is about the Shawinigate affair, in which former prime minister Jean Chretien was alleged to have thrown his weight around in his Shawinigan riding and engaging in (at the very least) some conflict-of-interest behaviour (here's a CBC.ca timeline, for those who care). The National Post, for which Kinsella writes a column, was obsessed with the story:

From the outset of the controversy, in or around 1999, the Post was determined to transform the inoffensive Quebec town of Shawinigan into something synonymous with the Watergate apartment complex. For months, Post reporter Andrew McIntosh (whose employer, it should be recalled, was suing the prime minister for denying him a lifetime barony) had been a veritable journalistic St. George, charging out to slay the twin-headed dragon of prime ministerial perfidy and misdeeds. To McIntosh’s frustration, no doubt, neither the Canadian public nor competing newspapers seemed to give a sweet damn. But the Post was undeterred, because, for most of the relevant period, it could count on Canada’s two conservative opposition parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, to do its bidding.

Disgruntled former Alliance staffers would later tell Liberals that the Post usually supplied the Alliance, under the leadership of Preston Manning or, later, Stockwell Day, with advance notice of the stories McIntosh and others intended to publish about Shawinigate. In this way, the Official Opposition would have sufficient time to prepare the questions it intended to raise in the House of Commons. It also ensured that the Post’s hoped-for revelations would receive a parliamentary boost, giving stories with a short shelf-life another day or two on the public agenda. While some of the twists and turns in the Shawinigate story had been the product of actual research efforts by the Tories or the Alliance themselves, it was common knowledge that most of the Shawinigan-related oppo was being done by the Post.

This is relevant because the Conservative Party, the successor to the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, used the allegation of a CBC reporter passing questions to a Liberal MP about the Mulroney-Schreiber affair as hook on which to hang a fundraising letter.

More in this earlier post.

While in Alberta last week, I was surprised to see a story in the Edmonton Journal that had energy industry types less than enthusiastic about the current spike in oil's price.

In India, a $2,500 car is unveiled to tap that market of 1.1 billion people.

In Canada, a CIBC World Markets analyst is predicting gasoline costs of $1.50 per litre in the near future.

From Russell Smith's column in todays Globe and Mail: (paywalled; subscriber access only)

Happiness sounds terribly sweet. Economists at something called the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research recently published a study that claimed to show that people who live in small towns in this country are happier than those who live in big cities. They claim that Saint John and Charlottetown are among the top five Canadian cities for quality of life. What could this "happiness" possibly mean?

The authors say people who trust in and are involved with their neighbours are happier, so you're better off in a small town. I say happiness is proximity to a video store with the complete Criterion Collection. If happiness means living in Saint John, then perhaps I want to be miserable.

Like the vast majority of political junkies watching the New Hampshire primary, I went into Tuesday night expecting Barack Obama to win, just like the polls said he would.

He didn't.

Butch Ward, a Poynter Institute fellow, says journalists could learn from the wise words of Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor.