One must admit, anent our boy George Dubya, that if you can't even get a two-day bounce -- from Saturday in South Carolina to Tuesday in Michigan -- after spending $30 million, you could be in trouble.

What a slugfest that was in South Carolina -- the best East Texas campaign I've seen in years. Open thuggery! John McCain accused Bush of being like Bill Clinton (horror of horrors), while Bush's supporters were accusing McCain of being gay, a womanizer, having a Jewish campaign chairman, a black daughter and a drug-addict wife. Boy, that was some goin' there. The Bushies must be proud of that one.

The great mystery at this point is why so many Republicans are still voting for Bush on the theory that he's their strongest candidate. One can see why the big-money Republicans are still for him -- McCain actually threatens to do something about big money in politics. But what about the rest of the R's?

National Public Radio has hired an ombudsman -- "to receive, independently investigate and respond to queries from the public regarding editorial standards in its programming." Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR vice president for news and information since 1997, is moving into the new position. A press release quotes him as saying that the creation of the ombudsman post "keeps NPR at the forefront of editorial excellence."

In this context, NPR's first ombudsman in two decades is not off to an auspicious start. The boosterism should make us wary. But Dvorkin seems committed to dialogue. "I'm the agent for the listener, and I'm there to help raise issues to the editorial staff that are of concern to the public," he told me in a recent interview.

Let's not bother to shed tears for the likes of E*Trade, Amazon.com and Buy.com. Sympathy seems misplaced for massive outfits that are blights on the Web as they strip-mall every pixel in reach. And I can't summon much empathy for the targeted website run by the Time Warner subsidiary CNN, a cable giant with millions of viewers every day.

But at the same time, even when electronic attacks occur against corporate sites with little or no socially redeeming value, I won't cheer for cyber-saboteurs. Efforts to censor or block communication are odious -- whether based in government offices, corporate suites or secret hacker locations. What we need is not less but more speech: and especially more diverse speech.

While they snipe at one another over golden oldies -- abortion, soccer moms and who-invented-Willie-Horton -- there is something happening out here. And they don't know what it is, do they, Mr. Jones?

Alan Greenspan, the great pooh-bah of the economy, just raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point -- the fourth increase since June -- and clearly signaled another increase to come on March 21. This was in an effort to tamp down the roaring stock market.

The response from the stock market? According to The Associated Press, "Investors poured money into the shares of technology companies to the exclusion of all other sectors." It was the speculation in high-tech stocks that Greenspan was trying to stop, so that was a brilliant success, wasn't it?

Bill Clinton used to quote a definition of insanity: It's doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again.

He is not the front-runner because he has a splendid record as the governor of a large state. (He has been a so-so governor of Texas, a record that qualifies him to be lieutenant governor of Texas -- which, as all Texans know, is the more powerful office.) He is the front-runner because he has $70 million in his campaign kitty.

And thereby hangs a tale. He has already spent $37 million, which is almost as much as the Democratic nominee will have to spend on his entire campaign up to Election Day, since the D will abide by spending limits in order to qualify for federal matching funds. Bush has raised so much money that he's well beyond needing federal funds and their accompanying limits.