Subcultures spawn defining rituals: fans of Insane Clown Posse have the Gathering of the Juggalos; practitioners of radical self-realization congregate at Burning Man; and for the national journo-politico elite and its legion of camp followers there are the publication of Bob Woodward's inside-the-Beltway, memo-and-tell, docudramas.

To be honest, I was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, before and even after Barack Obama won the nomination. I had hoped to celebrate the civil victory of a woman earning the party nomination, so it took me a little while to get behind Obama - whose nomination is, obviously, also a civil victory - because I was, frankly, utterly unprepared for him to be running on the Democratic ticket.

First she tried to market the image of herself as a fearless first-lady-caught-in the-line-of fire with her exaggerated claims of narrowly missing sniper fire while on a visit to Bosnia in 1996, but now she’s trying to dupe the public into thinking she possesses the same die-hard, give-it-your-all, not-going-down-without-a-fight personality as…Rocky Balboa? In her most recent public appearance, Senator Clinton compared herself to the legendary Sylvester Stallone character in a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia today

Even the hacks at Fox News got the bulletin after last night's victory speeches: John McCain can stoop to stealing Barack's stump taglines, but nobody -- American hero or no -- wants to follow Obama. Yes, Hillary is losing the ground game . . . hard. But, as you can see above, what we're really all agog about is MSNBC enabling embeds on their news video.

Unless there's busloads of uncounteds out there, Massachusetts looks like a rout. We'll leave the post-mortems to the guys on staff who know this stuff better than us, but you don't have to be Karl Rove to read this as a blow for Ted Kennedy -- of those polled, less than half of Massachusetts Democrats said Kennedy's endorsement of Obama was important -- and also a significant boost for Tom Menino, who stuck by the Hillz to the end.

I’m back in Boston after spending a couple of hours in Manchester, New Hampshire and must say that I’ve never encountered anything like the surge of interest in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Topic B was would McCain beat Romney? Although the men and the women in the street and at the polls seemed to think that the Republican race would be tight, their sense was that McCain would win.